


































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Class ~F W £ IQ 
Boo k .Ca. fo 

GopyiightU 0 _ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 












I 






THE FORCE OF 
INTERCESSION 


b y ^ 

CONRAD H. GOODWIN 

M.A., B. D. 



1922 

STRATFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY 

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 














~B V^io 

.Gr(# 


Copyright, 1922 

The STRATFORD CO., Publishers 
Boston, Mass. 





The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 


JUL 10 1922 

©CI.A874873 


/u b 


/ 


Contents 


Chapter 


Page 

I 

An Approach To Intercession 

. 1 

II 

Reasonable Obedience 

. 8 

III 

Kinsmen of God . 

. 14 

IV 

Men of God’s Plan 

. 18 

V 

Plan of Incarnation 

. 23 

VI 

Non-Christian Prayers in God’s 

Plan 27 

VII 

Force of Inspiration . 

. 31 

VIII 

Environment of The Soul . 

. 36 

IX 

Faith-Reach in Intercession 

. 42 

X 

Our Lord as Intercessor 

. 59 

XI 

The Spirit of Christ 

. 65 

XII 

With the Intercessor as Saviour . 

. 73 

XIII 

Power of Oneness 

. 79 

XIV 

God’s Plan in Intercession . 

. 84 

XV 

Special Providence 

. 91 

XVI 

Providence as Applied Law 

. 96 

XVII 

God’s Discriminating Goodness . 

. 102 

XVIII 

The Divine Restraint . 

. Ill 

XIX 

God Answers Intercessions 

. 118 

XX 

The Human Side 

. 124 

XXI 

On Being Present 

. 128 

XXII 

God’s Social Nature . 

. 136 

XXIII 

Man’s Social Nature at Prayer . 

. 141 



CONTENTS 


Chapter 


Page 

XXIV 

Solidarity of the Race 

. 145 

XXV 

Earnest of Eternal Fellowship . 

. 149 

XXVI 

Pain in God’s Plan of Life , 

. 151 

XXVII 

Prayer for Enemies 

. 155 

XXVIII 

Enemies in Fellowship 

. 164 

XXIX 

United Intercession 

. 168 

XXX 

Intercessions in Stewardship and Mis 



sions. 

. 173 

XXXI 

The Spirit of Internationalism in 


Intercession .... 

. 179 


Conclusion. 

. 181 











Introduction 



1HE act of praying for other people is a daring 


I quest. It means that God depends on us and 
waits to work through us as praying beings. If 
genuine, it cannot be a formal exercise of remem¬ 
bering others on our knees because of some fixed 
habit. It is either a mockery or an heroic conquest in 
the Spirit world. If real it means great constancy 
and energy of faith. Prevailing intercession pro¬ 
claims the freedom and right of a man’s soul to make 
a neighborhood of high heaven and of all creation. 
It asserts that a man has an inspiring reach which 
he must use. 

The principles involved in declaring the force of 
intercession are but a few fundamental spiritual 
relationships between ourselves, other men, and our 
God, expressed in reasoned terms. It is a way of so 
looking at life and of acting in life that here and now 
the doors of space and time swing open and men of 
faith work for God as souls that will not cringe nor 
be dismayed at the taunt of being impractical. 
Intercessors cease to treat lightly their claim of citi¬ 
zenship in the Kingdom of God. They use this 
particular method and plan of intercession in order 


INTRODUCTION 


to make the vast world of spiritual relationships 
more real than the material sense world. 

Because of the lure of material things; because of 
the failure of these material things to satisfy the 
claims and ambitions of men; because of the 
mysterious receipts, of mental and sensuous mixture, 
fed to hungry souls as a spiritual alchemy; because of 
the crude substitutes for true religion that blight the 
perceptions of men, certainly the time has fully come 
to enter upon intercession as a great plan of faith 
that will put our spiritual sense to the most definite 
test. If, as intercessors, we are not visionaries, who 
pursue a mirage across sands that waste our energies, 
then we are indeed sharers of a force too powerful 
and efficient to be disregarded. We cannot safely 
be lukewarm about intercession. If prayer for others 
seems only an academic question, it is the danger 
signal of an impotent, disheveled soul which is in¬ 
capable of entering upon its spiritual inheritance. 

In this study of intercession we seek to realize how 
God uses men’s prayers as the medium and agency 
of His aid to men; and why that aid must be withheld 
until men will plead for their brethren. We believe 
that a clearer grasp of the truth about intercession 
will greatly aid the responsive soul in becoming a 
veritable missioner to the world. 

All true living is an effort to discover and use real 
force. Lower forces of mind or body contend with 
spiritual forces. Real joy is the vigor of a man’s 


INTRODUCTION 


soul that rejoices in the Master’s test and answers: 
“we are able.” So we believe in intercession as a 
prevailing force. We would become intercessors to 
help wield the force of God’s Spirit which alone can 
change the world’s period of reconstruction into its 
great crowning era of regeneration and spiritual 
unity. 













' • 


























































































































* 


















































































CHAPTER I 


An Approach to Intercession 

M AN has been very satisfactorily 
defined as a ‘praying being.’ It dis¬ 
tinguishes him from brute creation. 
It states his kinship to God. History tells us 
that this is not a theory about man, but is 
the age-long observation of his nature and 
experience. It is his nature to pray to God; 
and throughout all his history man has prayed 
to God. True enough, some men pray only in 
great need or calamity. Others appear to pray 
only in a mechanical fashion. Some seem to 
have schooled themselves, in neglect or studied 
denial, to do without praying; but only by 
starving almost to the point of death those 
religious instincts (destined of God for con¬ 
victions) that were bent on prayer. 

And how do these so-called ‘strong-minded 
students ’ of human nature who have de¬ 
liberately neglected prayer, as an outworn use¬ 
less habit, explain the common practice of pray- 
[i] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


ing? They are apt to call it a form of 
self-culture,—a cultivation of generous im¬ 
pulses towards others. Men feel kindly toward 
their fellows, they tell us, in deep, constraining 
ways; so they clothe their thinking with the 
notions and claims of religion. And when 
asked how religion took root in human nature — 
what its origin is—pagan students have an 
answer ready to explain prayer, the character¬ 
istic action and habit of religion. 

Men have prayed for themselves and others 
they loved, so we are told, from the time when 
the universe was new and strange to them. Its 
mighty natural forces, so terrifying or im¬ 
pressive before they were explained by science, 
crowded their lives with dread or awe. And 
dreams took this raw material of fears and 
primitive imaginings and peopled natural forces 
with human instincts. In time the confused 
company of gods thus wrought out of the ima¬ 
gination were systematized; and later the god, 
or family of gods, of the most persistent or 
loyal adherents of their particular deity, won 
out in the Jewish and Christian conceptions of 
religion. 


M 


AN APPROACH TO INTERCESSION 


So the habit of praying, persisted in from 
generation to generation, assumed the right 
and force of an innate and permanent instinct. 
But, these naturalists add, no real outside aid 
from a Source of life is to be considered ser¬ 
iously. Beal communion, they claim, with 
Divine Life is impossible — since there is no 
God. 

Faith rather than reason must refute this 
pathetic theory. It creates more difficulties 
than it can possibly explain away. When we 
examine the substance of men’s praying for 
others we find that they pray as if there were 
communion and aid. If, in fact, there be none, 
then the so-called cultural value of prayer is 
gained at the expense of men’s intelligence. The 
mere idea that aid does come through prayer, 
makes every praying man impotent and foolish. 
It makes him unreal and childish in his citadel 
of conviction, sense-of-kinship and loyalty to 
God. 

But it is to men who believe in God, the God 
whom Christ reveals, that we write. We believe 
that intercession means both communion and 
aid and can mean nothing less to those who are 

[3] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


loyal to the teaching and Spirit of Jesus Christ. 
And yet to see more plainly how this is, and 
why this is, will strengthen our belief in inter¬ 
cession. 

All about us men grope and stumble on their 
uncertain way. War, as a great surgical oper¬ 
ation, has been gone through with. It has been 
more successful on the body than on the mind 
of the world. America has proved herself 
better as a surgeon than as a physician, bent 
on healing and prevention of further ill. 
‘ Physician, heal thyself ’ is a rightful challenge 
to ourselves who claim to have healing gifts and 
powers for the world’s health. Ours is a psychic, 
a moral, a spiritual lack. But happy are we of 
America that we begin to perceive these things 
and to hunger for what is true and strong of 
soul. If members of God’s Church who claim 
Christ’s spirit of discipleship would help right 
mightily we must destroy in ourselves with 
decisive stroke all enervating doubts about the 
fundamental things of God and the familiar 
claims of religion. The flood time in human 
history which we feel today is the swell of eager¬ 
ness and passion in men’s souls to live a fuller 


[4] 


AN APPROACH TO INTERCESSION 

and freer life. How may we help men to live 
as brethren of one household? Christians must 
employ certain definite ways of help. We must 
decide about intercession as one of these chief 
ways. Either it is of no practical use in aiding 
men, and so has no claim upon our time and 
energy, or else its value is supreme and its 
mission urgent. We are called upon to face this 
matter frankly and to decide it as a paramount 
issue of modern society and of religion. 

This is our approach to prayer. We firmly 
believe that energy in defense of Christian de¬ 
mocracy would be generated if men’s souls were 
able to go* out to God in intercession. Is there 
not, then, some lack of intelligent and deter¬ 
mined faith? For if Christian patriots really 
believe in intercession, as a great service and 
unlimited power, can they ignore this service 
altogether or pray only in a formal way? How 
frequently routine prayer is the effort of the be¬ 
wildered spirits of staggering men to keep their 
own faith alive! But does not God mean our 
prayers for others to be the strength of men 
who, at leisure from themselves, are mediums 
of God’s great conclusive power? If the struggle 

[ 5 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


to lift the instrument of prayer takes all our 
energy, how shall we wield it for others? 

Prayer may be only an unhappy struggle 
within ourselves until we have the joy of fight¬ 
ing with our whole souls for others. What is, 
after all, the chief hardship in these days of 
definite issues and decisive action? Is it not 
this: that our sympathies and vision of what 
is right is more shocked than used? We often 
feel that the force of our faith is not employed 
in any great way. When we have spoken this 
word, and accomplished this deed, that seems 
to count so little in making His kingdom come, 
then must our sympathies stand idle? Is this 
our reach? Rather our sympathies must be 
definitely and constantly used as intercession in 
order to liberate God’s resources. 

So we need at the outset to make a faithful 
effort to realize the task set before us; to per¬ 
ceive the sweet reasonableness of intercession. 
In the background is God’s power. In the fore¬ 
ground is the world’s need of our utmost ser¬ 
vice. We seek to see more clearly and believe 
more earnestly that our chief service is to lib¬ 
erate God’s power. By seeing what intercession 


[6] 


AN APPROACH TO INTERCESSION 


means, and something of how onr prayers work, 
our mission will be made too wonderful and 
urgent to neglect. Because we go to Calvary 
in prayer we want to know how it is that 
Calvary can go to the world. Until our minds 
understand this better our faith stumbles, and 
indifference, a lack of intelligent interest, de¬ 
stroys the vision and vigor of intercession. 


171 


CHAPTER II 


Reasonable Obedience 

W E CAN not reason ourselves into 
having, and using, the power of 
prayer. Even if we clearly under¬ 
stood the rich and deep meaning of intercession, 
would there yet be any assurance that we would 
wield the force of prayer? For the measure of 
men’s impotence is the yawning gap between 
their knowledge and their service. As Chris¬ 
tians we cannot issue a subpoena for faith to 
appear before the bar of reason. For we can 
be prevailing intercessors and yet know little 
of the science or philosophy of intercession. 
On the other hand we may study carefully what 
prayer means as a social phenomenon and yet 
have no force of spirit as masterful pleaders. 

We know in part. Wisdom will not die with 
us. We need not accept the hypothesis that men 
are not expected to intercede for their fellow- 
men until they understand plainly all that 
intercession means. Some skepticism or critical 


[8] 


REASONABLE OBEDIENCE 

faculty shall not pauperize our faith. For we 
depend on the earnestness and the increase of 
faith in order to know the true value of plead¬ 
ing for others. 

Prayer means that life is feeling after life. 
It is an attitude of the soul seeking the fellow¬ 
ship of other spiritual beings. But thinking 
must have its rightful place. The mental part 
of our Godward life has a clarifying and focus¬ 
ing mission to perform in us. Just because 
we want our faith to mean the impulse and 
attitude of our whole being turned to God, we 
need the intelligence section of the mobilized 
manhood. The vigor of the outreaching soul 
in prayer is influenced and somewhat deter¬ 
mined by the way in which the mind perceives 
and visions the task of prayer. It matters tre¬ 
mendously whether or not the mind is assured 
or dismayed. If intercession does not mean a 
great deal to us the spirit and force of this ser¬ 
vice may die in us and leave only the skeleton 
of habit. 

While, then, we do not insist upon a clear 
and full understanding of all that intercession 
means before we are willing to pray, yet, on 


[9] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


the other hand, unless prayer does possess and 
hold our reason more and more as we pray — 
until it does interest and stimulate and use our 
clearest thinking with ever-increasing force — 
in the end the result may be the same as if we 
did bring prayer and faith to the bar of reason. 
For indifference to prayer and the giving of 
interested thought to other things will cause 
intercession to die out of our life. And so the 
greatest danger is not that we will make a 
formal demand concerning what we must under¬ 
stand before we consent to pray. Chiefly we 
need to he on guard lest uninterested minds will, 
in fact, fail to intercede . And it is not the 
theory but the fact (the energy, the force) of 
intercession with which we are so greatly con¬ 
cerned. 

We are, therefore, prepared to give full 
weight both to faith and to reason. We do not 
feel mentally bound when we give chief em¬ 
phasis to faith; because we believe that the 
mind’s part in prayer is reasonable obedience 
to the Way—the great Intercessor. He alone 
can set the mind free in His truthfulness. And 
He has set the task of intercession. It was a 


[10] 


REASONABLE OBEDIENCE 


great part of His mission to arouse men’s 
minds and give men mental vigor. His method 
of education was for men to try out what He 
told them in order that they might have an 
experience and witness of His teaching in them¬ 
selves. This would make them more and more 
able in mental power. “If any man will do His 
will he shall know . 1 y The worldly mind, skillful 
in the things of earth, is impotent to sense and 
estimate the value of intercession. But 
Christians, if truly men of the Spirit, move on 
a plane of forceful worth that worldly men are 
ignorant of. The knowledge that such living 
is reasonable is inherent in the increasing in¬ 
sight and spiritual force that we feel in obeying 
the great Intercessor. The Spirit of God blows 
as a healing, saving breath through faithful, 
obedient-minded intercessors and sweeps on 
towards men in need;—given human mission 
and qualified by the conscious good-will and 
sympathy of men who pray for their fellows. 

This then is our mental attitude towards 
intercession. We intercede with God for men 
because there grows up within us the belief that 
it is reasonable to trust God. He tells us to 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


pray for others. And so as Christians we ac¬ 
cept the hypothesis that our faith, responsive 
to Him in an active, earnest fashion in prayer 
for others, will constantly inform and assure 
us with the intelligence of God’s own Spirit of 
light and truth. By the act of doing His will 
in intercession we are illumined and em¬ 
powered by the Spirit of Wisdom to perceive 
what intercession means, and to rejoice in its 
value. 41 Seek and ye shall find.” We verify 
by faith at work in prayer the Master’s state¬ 
ment that if any man will do His will he shall 
know. 

Yet it is plain we do not put aside the “how” 
and “why” of intercession. It is also clear 
that we do not seek to answer these thoughts 
that arise in us as skeptics or rationalists hut 
as men of God who would register their ex¬ 
perience of the Spirit of God working in them. 
As men striving humbly for greater faith and 
spiritual insight we would awake mentally to 
the great power and urgency of intercession. 
The Body of Christ too frequently hesitates to 
express His sympathy and power in the reach 
of intercession because of the scepticism and 
[ 12 ] 


REASONABLE OBEDIENCE 


doubts and earth-born criticisms about the ways 
of God which St. Paul says cannot be judged 
aright by once-born men. Why should Chris¬ 
tians let the scoffing of worldly minds cast a 
chill over their impulse to pray, and make inter¬ 
cessors self-conscious to the point of spiritual 
impotence? And where mental indifference is 
the cause we have need to consider with burn¬ 
ing shame the bare intervals of neglect in our 
intercessions. Are they not yawning gaps of 
selfish unconcern separating us from our Lord 
and His mission? So it is that we challenge our 
imaginations, our interest, our mental vigor con¬ 
stantly to consider why it is that intercession 
is so powerful, and how it is that our soul life 
can be of inestimable worth in, and as, 
intercession. 


[ 13 ] 


CHAPTR III 


Kinsmen of God 

W E HAVE seen that intercession has no 
intelligent moral force, and so need 
not hold our attention, unless it means 
spiritual communion with the Source of Life. 
Now many men, realizing this, do not find it 
difficult to talk with God and even make per¬ 
sonal requests in prayer. They believe God 
can and will help them. But here is the 
stumbling block: how shall man ’s praying help 
God do His great, saving work in the world? 

Let us realize at the outset that this is not the 
isolated difficulty of intercession. It introduces 
us to the right way of thinking of all that con¬ 
cerns the soul and its kinship to the Source of 
Life who constantly feeds the soul, and gives 
it worth by making its work in the world count. 
Let us think that religion means life; and that 
life, consciously akin to God, means religion. 
God is a Spirit, He tells us. And we know that 
we are spiritual beings. And our oneness —our 


KINSMEN OF GOD 


kinship — with God means the One Spirit in 
us. We share His spiritual nature. Of course 
God transcends us as He dwells in all men and 
all creations. So we will not understand how 
our work of intercession can count (can be of 
great value to God) until we perceive how our 
very souls count, and what our spiritual per¬ 
sonality means, as a ‘ force ’ which God makes 
and sustains and stimulates constantly with His 
own life. 

We help God in our work of intercession 
because we are God’s work. Our nature is His 
‘pleroma’ or fulness of creative force thrust 
out beyond Himself — as creation — and yet 
ever claimed as His kind and kindred. He, in 
us, is our force — indirectly as the faculties and 
personal powers we call human, and directly as 
immanent Spirit. Now when we are conscious 
of His kinship it means the touch and impulse 
of God’s own Spirit in us. Intercession is the 
sense of kinship with God put to service for 
others. So it can not mean that we, in our 
human strength, apart from God, help God do 
His work by praying for others. What ever 
help we are in prayer goes right to this ques¬ 
ts] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


tion: ‘ ‘ What is our nature that we share with 
God?” Then at once we are led to consider 
how our kinship to Him means His very life 
constantly creating and sustaining us. It fol¬ 
lows that we cannot isolate our work in prayer 
and discuss it apart from His work in our 
praying. 

We would read Gospel truth with tire and 
force of imagination. In God we ‘Give and 
move and have our being.” This is a tre¬ 
mendous, inspiring fact! We are constantly 
coming out from Him and being enkindled and 
invigorated by Him. “In Him was life and the 
life was the light of men” — “the true light 
which lighteth every man coming into the 
world.” Hence our intercession is not the 
movement of our individual, isolated soul 
toward God. It means God’s Source-life in us 
reaching up to the Source-life outside us. It 
means God’s Spirit of kinship in us offering 
itself to those outside ourselves. For this 
Spirit of God in us is one Spirit everywhere. 
With powerful intent He would awaken in all 
men that force and joy of His fellowship which 
we feel in prayer. 


KINSMEN OF GOD 


Do we, then, not see plainly how shallow and 
superficial is the objection to intercession as 
our powerless effort to aid, unless we are pre* 
pared to deny our spiritual nature and Chris¬ 
tian inheritance. When we ask what we can do 
to help God we must ash what the instigating 
Spirit in us can do to help God; can do to help 
Himself — being God! Of course we have no 
self-reservoir of spiritual force to help God 
with, simply by pleading for others. We seek 
Him in prayer as Intercessor because His 
Spirit of intercession possesses us, and accord¬ 
ing to His intercessory nature strives to work 
in us and through us to reach those in need. 

Surely God y s presence in us must mean some¬ 
thing — must do something. Every answered 
prayer, however beclotted and beclouded with 
earthiness our pleading may be, bears witness 
to our kinship to God. Our pleading is our 
record of the impulses of God in the soul. The 
great Intercessor says He can use us. Can He? 
Either He can use us as instruments or we 
must block His work, since we can not be 
neutral. 


[17] 


CHAPTER IV 


Men of God’s Plan 


W E WOULD not be limited in spiritual 
power by our physical presence. All 
the world calls for our help. We feel 
the shame of dissipating our force of good-will 
in vain reflections and vague regrets and wast¬ 
ing pity concerning the crying needs of men. 
Exhaustive complaints about self-limitations 
absorb the mental powers that might be used to 
raise sympathy and good-will to the nth power 
in intercession. With true soldier-spirit we 
assent obediently to the placing of our prayers 
at the disposal of others, and intercede, because 
God tells us to. But we want to see more clearly 
what we do; how we do it; why we do it. It 
will make prayer more interesting; more sig¬ 
nificant. We want to perceive what intercession 
means because it will enlighten, invigorate, im- 
power faith more and more as God’s instru¬ 
ment. We use our minds to strengthen our 
morale as intercessors. 


MEN OF GOD’S PLAN 

But it will not avail to draw abstract con¬ 
clusions. As judges looking on apart from 
praying men, we can reach no spiritual con¬ 
clusions about prayer. Only as praying men 
groping for the light will we find light. We 
cry in the world’s darkness for the dawn. We 
intercede with our Father on behalf of deso¬ 
lated homes and for those who pay the cruel 
toll of battlefields and merciless persecution. 
Our spirit of sympathy is raised to Love in 
intercession for orphans and exiled poor, and 
for women of Eastern lands who suffer shame¬ 
less crimes of war. But then, it may be, as we 
strive to pray the light of our pleading 
becomes dim! Hope, as the strong expec¬ 
tancy of faith, begins to lose force. The mind 
begins to ask questions and the answer we give 
ourselves will encourage or distress us! Is not 
God wise enough to know, we ask, and intent 
upon supplying, His children’s need? Of 
course we must give money to feed and shelter. 
We must go or send others to help the hungry 
and down-trodden. And those who help the 
oppressed must serve them with Christian 
sympathy. But to lift my heart to God in His 

[ 19 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


House of Prayer, or in the home, and ask Him 
to help His own children — of what possible 
value is this ? Is He not willing to aid without 
the fragile force of my moral energy in prayer? 

There are those who fear to face burning 
questions like these. They prefer blind faith 
or credulity — lest the equilibrium of what faith 
they have be upset. Others face them honestly 
and cease to pray. Others go on praying, not 
wisely but too well versed in the form of sound 
words to cease to pray. But the Apostle bids 
us give a reason of the hope that is in us. How 
can my prayer reinforce God? Does prayer 
mean making God strong enough to rescue His 
own world? Is not this an impious and im¬ 
possible task? How is it possible to add to the 
Father’s power a weight of good-will and sym¬ 
pathy in prayer sufficient to turn the scales in 
behalf of His kingdom! 

In our study of kinship to God we found the 
answer to these questions. But confidence is 
gained as we face them at every turn and 
challenge their utmost attack. God is all in 
all. He constantly lighteth every man. He, we 
have seen, is the force of that spiritual nature 


[20] 


MEN OF GOD’S PLAN 


in us which prays to Him. No, we can not 
‘reinforce’ God. God’s grace goes before and 
follows us. Our highest achievement is to be¬ 
come a living medium — the agent — of God’s 
good-will and power of love that moves in us, 
and out from us, in intercession. 

Keen, reverent minds are encouraged to 
know that they are not asked to add to the all- 
embracing Love of God. But a further question 
often vexes and distresses men: if we do not 
‘add’ to God’s power, is it possible that His 
force of good needs direction through me? Is 
God so partial or indecisive or capricious that 
He helps only as He is asked by men? How 
does He so work in me and through me that 
I can be used by Him as a force to help those 
I pray for? 

The following studies will be an effort to 
answer these questions. We shall see that 
God’s help to men has method and plan. Just 
because God is all-powerful Love He will not 
fail to employ (so far as we are able in will) 
the potential power of love which He has en¬ 
trusted to each of us to use for others in inter¬ 
cession. Else our personality would be a use- 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


less piece of machinery in God’s plans. If not 
a 4 way through’ we would of necessity be an 
abandoned trail of God’s Spirit. It would 
mean that the atmosphere of the soul was too 
enervating and stagnant to communicate with 
others in the One Spirit of fellowship and love. 
The Spirit would of necessity have to seek some 
other current outside us. We were created as 
a part of God’s plan to which He committed 
Himself when He made us akin to Him. It was 
His plan to make us men of faith-reach, and 
so of spirit-force, who would use the limited 
time and space life only as a springing-board 
to leap from. So we see that God in His wisdom 
works by a definite plan in helping men, and 
that whatever other plan He might have de¬ 
signed, we are in fact a real part of the plan 
He does employ to save and satisfy men with 
Himself. 


[ 22 ] 


CHAPTER V 


Plan of Incarnation 

W HEN we have studied with spiritual 
insight the history of the Jewish 
people and the history of the Christian 
Church we understand plainly that God has 
been developing and reclaiming the souls of 
men according to a definite method. The re¬ 
ligious insight and faith of the Hebrew people 
was used of God as an entering wedge into the 
apostate life of the world. He took this faith 
in Him, infused with His Spirit, and prepared 
the consciousness and will of the Jews for the 
destined advent of Messiah. And when in the 
fulness of time God revealed Himself in human 
flesh, as the Son of Man, He pointed men for¬ 
ward to the time when the Spirit of His incar¬ 
nate Life (which He lived in life and death) 
working through His disciples, should redeem 
the race and establish His kingdom on Earth 
as it is in Heaven. “ Neither pray I for these 
alone but for them also which shall believe on 
[ 23 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Me through their word.” He bade men pray 
and strive for this with all the enthusiasm and 
force of their loyalty and determined service. 
He did not consider it an impossible dream. He 
mapped it out as a practical program for men 
of faith. 

Our Lord, then, arranged that His world- 
conquest should be accomplished by His dis¬ 
ciples becoming His living plan. But as 
complete in themselves — apart from Him — 
they could do nothing. He had revealed to men 
His Spirit of loving trust and eager friendship. 
Men had felt the Spirit of His strong sympathy 
and honor and moral trueness. They knew His 
indignation at the strong hold of sense-life that 
took the spiritual freedom and joy out of His 
human kin. He promised men that the Holy 
Spirit, as this Spirit Who had been revealed in 
His life, would possess and control them accord¬ 
ing to the measure of their faith and obedience. 
“He will guide you into all truth .... for He 
shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto 
you.’ ’ 

So God’s incarnate plan was that men should 
communicate to each other, in God’s presence, 
[ 24 ] 


PLAN OP INCARNATION 


the Spirit Who had won men in His earthly 
life. If God can not use men as His plan of 
redeeming the race, then the plan of the 
Incarnation fails. Bnt unless that plan is 
limited to the physical presence of man with 
man, intercession is a great agency of spiritual 
reach and fulness little appreciated and used. 
Our Lord said much more about using our faith 
than He did about using our physical powers 
and senses. And He showed that faith has no 
physical limits. The reach of our faith — 
actual, living faith — towards men is the 
unchecked, untrammeled personal medium 
which God seeks to use to possess men every¬ 
where with the Spirit of His Incarnation. 

“All things are possible to him that 
believeth.” Intercession is belief that we can 
share the One Spirit of the Universal Man with 
all men. Not in fancy or theory but in fact our 
intercessory faith is a medium of Christ s 
Spirit to reach those we pray for. How often 
this faith of ours lacks genuine conviction to 
carry with telling force our experience of the 
blessed Spirit of Love to others! 

I think we do not really believe that God 


[25] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


waits upon our will to intercede — to extend 
to others the blessings and power of the great 
Intercessor. The Spirit of His life (which He 
offers us) is not only the Spirit of His 
magnetism and charm that spake to men phy¬ 
sically present, and touched them with healing, 
but is the Spirit of One Who interceded with 
dominant force for men absent in body. In the 
days of His flesh Christ reached absent men 
with the impassioned earnestness of His 
prayer-spirit. Unless our intercessory faith is 
the medium of our Lord’s intercessory Spirit 
to all men, how real can the great Intercessor 
Himself be to us? To attempt to shut Him in, 
in our physical contacts, is to shut Him out in 
one of the great ways wherein He revealed 
Himself. Only our pleading for others can 
possess as well as share Christ’s prayer-reach. 
Intercession is our one claim upon Him as 
Intercessor, and unless we do know Him as 
Intercessor, how little do we know Him at all as 
He really is! 


[ 26 ] 


CHAPTER VI 

Non-Christian Prayers in God's Plan 

W E HAVE considered intercession as a 
force in us, and through us, in God's 
plan of Incarnation. Has He other 
plans? Were there not ways of Providence 
before this plan was revealed to men? Are 
there not still other ways of comfort and aid? 
When we think of the world's life his¬ 
torically, and as one great whole, the whole 
meaning of intercession naturally presses upon 
us for clear explanation. 

Again, this is no isolated problem of inter¬ 
cession but only the question of understanding 
God's ways of dealing with all life other than 
life lived in a Christian way. We go back to 
the beginnings of time for our background. It 
was the Spirit of God the Word (through 
Whom were all things created) Who brooded 
over the waters, and lighteth every man coming 
into the world. Wherever and whenever men 
pray in the Spirit Who inspires truth and 

I>7] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


honor and sympathy and brotherhood, they 
pray in this Spirit of the Word. It does not 
change this fact that they do not know that the 
Spirit of Divine Life spake by the prophets, 
and in the last days spake unto us in God’s Son. 
Although men knew not the Word made flesh, 
still it was the Word, as St. Paul declared, 
Whom, ignorantly, men worshipped. And 
whether or not they know it today, yet to the 
extent that men really pray they pray to the 
God Who has bound up the completed destiny 
of each soul and the race with the working out 
of His plan of Incarnation. Those only who 
consciously aid, in their prayers, in the working- 
out of this plan, have the joy of understanding 
God’s final plans of soul-health and fellowship 
in the world. 

It is not, then, that other prayers besides 
those that are consciously and earnestly Chris¬ 
tian have no effect, when men make petitions 
for their brethren, but rather that only 
Christian prayers have full force in becoming 
a part of God’s final plan for the world’s 
redemption. The trueness and power of our 
Christian experience determines the force of 
[28] 


NON-CHRISTIAN PRAYERS IN GOD’S PLAN 


our soul-reach in intercession. The non- 
Christian who is still groping after the God of 
his life can not be expected to have the same 
mission of prayer-life to others. His soul is not 
organized and given full efficiency as a vital 
part in the plan of love which God showed in 
the plan of Incarnation. But God has moved 
in the conscience of non-Christian men and in 
their corporate life. Many true prophets with 
strong intimations of God have uttered some 
partial truth which has helped men to live 
nobly. We believe that the worth of their 
prayers is judged of God by the spiritual worth 
of their souls, whatever that may be. 

We know not what additional chances of 
future help — whether of intercession or by 
some other method — may be theirs in other 
worlds. But the force of intercession is the 
force of intelligent, co-operating faith that is 
able, as a medium and agent, to receive and so 
to speed on His way the One, abundant Spirit 
of Life Whom Christ revealed. Without dis¬ 
paraging whatever force in prayer the greatest 
non-Christian man may have, yet we count the 
least member of the Kingdom of Christ's Spirit 
[ 29 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


as greater than he. And so there can be no 
clearer duty or nobler challenge to us than to 
give to the faith of unchristian men (and so to 
give to their praying for others) the force of 
Christ’s Spirit of fellowship and mission to 
others. For through the travail of intercessory 
Spirit, in praying Christian men, (who are able 
to sweat as it were drops of blood for their 
brethren, and to drink of the Master’s cup) the 
redemption of the race shall be accomplished 
by men’s One Lord and Master. 


[ 30 ] 


CHAPTER VII 


Force of Inspiration 

W HY do men want to commune with 
God? Why do they want to intercede 
for other men? The answer is plain: 
they are moved by the Spirit of Christ. Prayer, 
when vital, springs out of the grace our Lord 
is constantly supplying. Men are inspired to 
pray for others. So it is no accident that they 
become, in fact, more and more unselfish 
through intercession, and acquire a firmer 
grasp on spiritual values. 

We would not expect intercession to have 
any force if our desires in prayer were not 
right and true. To clamor to God for that 
which even worldly men about us see to be 
ruinous for our loved ones is not Christian 
intercession. If we utter any prayer which we 
ourselves could not consider as a movement of 
the Spirit in us — as an inspiration — plainly 
then it is a prayer-impulse to be checked lest 


[3i] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


our soul sink to its level and lose somewhat of 
its sensitiveness to God. 

Prayer is a form of absence from God if it has 
not the Spirit’s prompting. A soldier, for 
instance, crouching in the trench in cowardly 
fear, prays to God to protect him and keep 
him safe. His prayer encourages his self- 
interest, his fear. He keeps his mind on him¬ 
self and tries to honor his fear with pious 
claims on God. So his prayer is a form of 
absence. His comrade scorns safety because 
his soldier-thrust will help to protect other 
comrades and vindicate a righteous cause. He 
feels it is weak and selfish to absorb time and 
nervous energy in prayer about his own safety. 
He does not pray, and yet he may be nearer 
God in Spirit than his selfish praying comrade. 
But neither of these has the fine, invincible 
morale of the soldier who has caught the 
heroic, dominant Spirit of the Christ who faced 
death with unflinching loyalty to the Father’s 
cause. “Whom seek ye?” He asked as He 
went to meet His murderers: “If therefore ye 
seek Me, let these (My disciples) go their way.” 
So the soldier-intercessor who fights for a 

[ 32 ] 


FORCE OF INSPIRATION 

righteous cause and who has the inspiration of 
Christ in his heart, increases nerve and force 
and fearless thrust through his prayer for his 
comrades, his home, and for the coming of the 
Kingdom in all human hearts. The prayer for 
himself is that, if need be, he shall save his 
life by losing it for Christ’s sake. Intercession 
generates in the true intercessor the soldier- 
spirit. 

Should we not think more and more of pray¬ 
ing as a transfigured thing? What seems a 
human aspiration in prayer is in essence an 
inspiration. Many writers of deep insight give 
testimony to this truth. Isaac Rennington 
believes in “the going forth of the Spirit of life 
towards the Fountain of life for fullness and 
satisfaction.” Julian speaks of man’s longing 
toward God as stirred by the Holy Spirit Who 
comes with Christ. And we find this clear 
statement by Dr. Hastings: “The faith that 
steals in at prayer time is the tacit assurance — 
though we may not put it in so many words 
— that our prayer is the real expression of 
Divine desire working within us.” Our Lord 
tells His disciples to believe that they receive 

[33] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


that for which they pray. But how could they 
have this assurance of faith unless their desires 
in prayer were of the Spirit — were begotten 
of God? 

We are so prone to take only the human 
view-point and perspective about intercession, 
as with all other human acts, and so set our¬ 
selves the impossible task of trying to think out 
what faith and intercession mean apart from 
God. But would it not profit to reflect that 
unless men find some Divine action in inter¬ 
cession they cannot intelligently explain even 
the human side of intercession. 

It becomes plain, then, when we think of the 
instigating Spirit in prayer, that if we do not 
believe that our intercession has results, no less 
than this appalling condition must be ours: 
that we block in our natures the Spirit’s life. 
He can not fulfill Himself in us and do His 
work through us! He can not live in our faith 
as the might and freedom of His all-embracing 
Life is wont to live, in a limitless and universal 
way. So if the Saviour of men disregards our 
intercession He denies His Self-realization in 
us, and so disregards His own nature. If the 

[ 34 ] 


FORCE OF INSPIRATION 


impulses of the Intercessor-Spirit Who moves 
us to intercession can not work through us, it 
must mean that the Inspirer of men has become 
a house divided against itself! 


CHAPTER VIII 


Environment of the Soul 


S OMETIMES learned men tell us we can 
not prove God’s presence. Of course 
scientific analysis and human philosophy 
can not reach, much less fathom, the grace that 
God imparts to the soul. But scientists and 
philosophers who are men of God bear witness 
in great numbers, in their eager act of praying 
for men, that force of spirit is possessed and 
used by them. They gladly tell others they find 
God to be the real background of the soul. 
Their faith draws on the environment they 
find in and about them. The sort of proof they 
possess in themselves is a pragmatic witness 
to the God of their life. 

Dr. Hastings has suggested that the environ¬ 
ment has always produced the appetite. So the 
native and persistent effort of the soul to inter¬ 
cede for others bears witness to a Divine envir¬ 
onment. When this environment is known and 
felt in men as the Spirit of their Leader, it 

[ 36 ] 


ENVIRONMENT OF THE SOUL 

works as intercession. For the Intercessor 
works in and through them. The glad witness 
of intelligent Christians is: he that “hath an 
ear” may “hear what the Spirit saith.” We 
fall down to worship — having seen and heard. 

The soul made healthy with the nurture of 
God finds that its environment is a moving, 
personal force, that constantly enters man’s 
time and space life and seeks to enlighten it, 
to transfigure it, and to reach others through 
it as a useful medium. The environment is not 
stagnant. If it seems so in us, we have blocked, 
or tried to block, the eager, moving Spirit of 
the conquering Christ. If not intercessors, our 
flesh life seeks to hold in but some self-claimed 
eddy of the abundant waters of the Spirit on our 
little time-shore, while the great currents of 
God’s healing, and power to fulfill needy men, 
move on mightily through eager hearts able in 
faith. 

There are those who think that they can 
analyze all of the spiritual meaning out of inter¬ 
cession and yet explain the instinct and act of 
praying for others. They deny the need of a 
Spirit-environment in the soul. They tell us 

[ 37 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


that men, through their social instincts, natur¬ 
ally feel good-will and sympathy to comrades 
beyond sense-reach. They say that we hope 
and desire instinctively to reach beyond the 
isolated, sense-confined life to some larger 
fellowship. And they feel that the comfortable 
hope men cling to (that this outreach of instinct 
helps others beyond sense-reach) prejudices 
people in favor of the worth of intercession, 
and makes them conclude all too readily that 
they aid those prayed for. 

This social impulse is certainly real. And 
we believe that only too frequently intercession 
on the part of tired or sleepy or indifferent 
petitioners is little more than the stirring of 
some social impulse. Again, there may be 
unquestioned vigor of human emotion in prayer 
without drawing on the deeps of soul environ¬ 
ment. But must we not postulate a God to 
explain even the outreach of man’s unselfish 
social nature? For unselfish human nature 
means somewhat of the Spirit’s fashioning 
presence. But only when conscious and deter¬ 
mined (as faith in a saving Lord) will our 
intercession have part and force in the 
[ 38 ] 


ENVIRONMENT OF THE SOUL 

Incarnation-Plan. For then we answer onr 
brother *s call for help in the name of the Inter¬ 
cessor. “If ye shall ask anything in My name I 
will do it.” Only with the vision of Christ’s 
power of sympathy and healing in our souls 
can we set up a triumphant movement of the 
Spirit that will lift our fellows out of soul 
danger. If we have no conquering religious 
experience, our religion will not reach far, as 
intercession, to aid others. 

May we not be assured, then, that analysis of 
the social nature of prayer can neither prove 
nor disprove the souPs spiritual background. 
Just what prayer might mean to one not con¬ 
scious of spiritual environment is no indication 
whatever of what prayer does mean to those 
who are conscious of that environment. An 
analysis of the human agency of intercession 
gives no insight into the background of Spirit. 
Men of faith, able in spirit, do, in fact, use this 
background of Spirit for others. 

When souls are on fire with the Spirit neither 
they nor others can distinguish between aspira¬ 
tion and inspiration. The once-born man, look¬ 
ing on, proceeds learnedly to explain the 

[ 39 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


aspiration. St. Paul cries out in joy: “for me 
to live is Christ.” “I live, .yet not I but 
Christ.” He bears witness to inspiration. The 
difference in view-point lies in the experience 
of the Spirit which St. Paul tells us makes men 
able to judge all things even though themselves 
can be judged of no man who is not born again. 
Without the breath of the Spirit our social 
instincts trail off impotently into imagination 
and physical waste. Only as spiritual force 
can the feelings within us become objective aid 
to those we can not reach with sense-presence. 
Our sufficiency in aiding others through prayer 
is of God. 

“Pray ye the Lord of the harvest”: and we 
pray believing that He is faithful Who prom¬ 
ised, and is able to perform that committed 
unto us. Nor do we believe blindly or in a 
servile manner. “I have not called you ser¬ 
vants but friends” — in the knowledge received 
from the Father. So Christ assures us. And 
if we take our social teaching from God Incar¬ 
nate can we believe that there is any real unity 
of race (of men as spiritual personalities) until 
men everywhere are nourished and inspired by 


[ 40 ] 


ENVIRONMENT OP THE SOUL 


Him? For though all men are of one blood, 
yet it is the intercessory pleading and sacrificial 
blood-shedding which Christian men are willing 
to do for other men (because God’s valuation 
of others moves them) that enables the ‘one 
blood ’ of the race to respond to its one 
background — the Holy Spirit. Prevailing 
prayer is symbolic. It is sacramental blood 
effort. It is the impulse of the blood of the 
race stirred with the Spirit’s intent, — with a 
will to fellowship that constantly draws its 
worth of spirit and plans of living from Him 
Who ‘filleth all in all.’ 


[4i] 


CHAPTER IX 


Faith-reach in Intercession 

T O MOST men it will not seem hard to 
believe that our faith, when real, makes 
us immediately present with God. We 
are told that St. Francis would commune with 
God for hours; and there was such an under¬ 
standing in spirit that he would only utter at 
intervals the one beloved Name. But assenting 
to this, we ask: though prayer reaches God, yet 
can the prayer of faith reach men absent from 
us in body? Can we convince ourselves that 
this is true? Will our intelligence believe that 
it is possible? 

It is plain enough that I can remember an 
absent person so clearly, and imagine his pres¬ 
ence so graphically, that he may seem for the 
moment more real than objects and people 
about me. Suppose, for instance, one hears a 
violin tremble with home airs in a foreign land. 
The tune is associated with some familiar face. 
It seems as if the accents of a dear voice sound 


[ 42 ] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 

in the ear. But the music ceases. Reality about 
us draws the curtain on the home scene which 
memory and imagination had staged. Then 
loneliness and a sense of separation become 
more acute than ever. Even when rejoicing in 
the fleeting vision of home it is the absence of 
loved ones that seems the real and solid truth. 

And can our sympathy or social impulses 
reach any more truly to absent men! Suppose 
I learn carefully the distressing condition of 
women and children in Armenia and my sym¬ 
pathy goes out to them in prayer. Will this 
lend any actual aid to them! Memory and 
imagination seemed impotent as means of real 
communion with absentees. And will the under¬ 
standing sympathy of our prayers be any real 
aid to those we intercede for! Now, when we 
have exhausted the catalogue of human powers 
and their possible ‘reach’ our actual absence 
from those across the seas will doubtless seem 
the convincing truth (no matter how earnestly 
we intercede) until we are able to believe that 
the soul has a power and a mission here and 
now in this world that has nothing whatever to 
do with distances. The very word ‘ reach’ is an 

[43] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


ambiguous figure for a kind of spiritual service 
which must be thought in different terms (so 
far as we are able) from the terms of time and 
space. 

Consider how our Lord counted on human 
faith and used it for others. It will help us 
to perceive spiritual truth, and not reason only 
with the surface intellect. When Jesus saw the 
faith of the men who carried their sick com¬ 
panion (not, so far as we are told, the faith 
of the sick man) He said to the sick of the 
palsy: “Son be of good cheer; thy sins be 
forgiven thee.” To the Syrophoenician inter¬ 
cessor He exclaimed: “0 woman, great is thy 
faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” She 
sought the healing of her absent child. Again 
we read: “according to thy faith so be it done 
unto thee.” And think further of the force 
of a man’s faith in aid of his afflicted child — 
absent in mind if not in body. The parent 
pleads to Jesus: “if Thou canst do anything 
have compassion.” Jesus answers: “if thou 
canst believe; all things are possible to him that 
believeth. n 

Now the Saviour taught plainly that His 

[ 44 ] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 

physical power was primarily used to show 
men, and prove to men, His spiritual power over 
the soul. When faithful men brought their sick 
comrade, Jesus’ first impulse was to save the 
sick man’s soul. “That ye may know that the 
Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, 
(then saith He to the sick of the palsy,) arise.” 
It shows us that Jesus used men’s faith to help 
both the bodies and the souls of others; and it 
further shows that all the examples cited in the 
paragraph above are one both in the spirit of 
Jesus’ dealing and in the use He made of 
human faith, whether or not the needy one was 
present, in body, with his intercessors. Jesus 
seems utterly to disregard time and space in 
His use of men’s prayers of faith. “More 
things are wrought by prayer than this world 
dreams of.” He will use our faith indepen¬ 
dently of sense life if we do not insist on think¬ 
ing that our faith is bounded by the senses. 

If Intercession makes any intelligent claim 
upon our time and interest we will readily agree 
to this principle: that the faith we exercise in 
prayer-for-others does enable God, in some 
way, to help others. But how does the effectual 

[45] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


fervent prayer of a righteous man avail much? 
Men will differ here. And the difference in 
explanation need not prevent the force of 
intercession in each. But to those who are often 
discouraged at prayer by the honest admission 
they feel forced to make to themselves — that 
they have no explanation of how faith helps 
others in intercession — we suggest the follow¬ 
ing way through. 

Perhaps it is the common belief that our 
entire function as intercessors is to pray God 
to help men who are absent from us in body and 
spirit. And we believe our work stops there. 
But it may be easier to see how intercession 
helps 4 absent ’ men, and a more accurate insight 
into God’s methods may be gained, if we say 
that we ourselves help them, in some direct and 
immediate way, as well as request that some 
aid be sent down to them from heaven. Else 
our faith would have no reach toward absent 
men but would reach only to God. To use a 
very ‘material’ figure we may say that unless 
our faith has an immediate part to play in aid¬ 
ing men, the Lord is both the wireless station 
and the operator in the spiritual transaction 

[46] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 


which is assumed by our intercession. He re¬ 
ceives the call we send up to Him to help needy 
men. And there our message stops. Then, 
because our prayer has reached Him, He sends 
out His own light and truth and power from 
heaven to those we prayed for. This seems to 
mean that somehow we have caused God to see 
the need we see, or to feel the need we feel, or 
to have the needful amount of stimulated good¬ 
will and sympathy, to aid blind, sinful men we 
pray for. 

May it not be, to revert to the figure above, 
that our pleading-faith ‘ calls ’ God and that He 
answers the call by reaching needy men from 
the standpoint and approach of His presence 
in our faith who plead! Then men would know 
Him as the God of our human nature. Then 
they would feel conscious of worshipping a com¬ 
mon Father because our force of sympathy is 
a carrying medium which God finds open to 
Him. May it not mean that God, as the Maker 
and Saviour of some sinful life, is unable to 
make plain to this careless one the power of 
His saving love until in our intercession the one 
who is sought of God finds Him (becomes alive 


[47] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


to Him) as the God of our life who pray. The 
Lord (in Whose encompassing Spirit of life 
our spiritual, yet human will-to-help is given 
actual part and place) finds men we plead for 
to the extent that our pleading finds God. For 
the God Who promised not only to be with us 
but “in us” changes our ashing into His answer¬ 
ing—within us—and in the act of our praying. 
For we can not separate between our asking 
faith and God’s answering Spirit; which is the 
very essence and force of our prayer-faith. 

This approach helps to answer the question 
which so naturally persists in our minds: is not 
Christ’s incarnate wealth and power of human¬ 
ity (which He has shown as His very Self in 
His relations to men and His rights in the God¬ 
head) sufficient reach and medium of human¬ 
ness, and intercessory power of Spirit? Since 
He has the fulness of our humanity, and inter¬ 
cedes, what could we possibly do more in 
intercession? Is not this sufficient touch and 
contact of a human sort with the man who needs 
Him? Yet in the fullness of our thinking we 
realize that our intercession, as spiritualized 
faith, is ‘part’ of God’s one Saving Spirit. The 

[48] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 


incarnate sympathy Christ stirs in our prayers 
is the Incarnate One Himself at work in prayer 
and Spirit for other men. It is of the nature 
of His will and Self-giving that they without 
us shall not he made perfect. So he extends 
Himself, and His power, to others as the God 
in men who pray and who have (inseparable 
from their faith-prayer) that phase, quality, 
and kind of His divine Self-giving that needy 
men can perceive and respond to. A man never 
gains a Christian conception of God as the God 
Whom he can separate from the Communion 
of Saints, but as the God Who claims a man’s 
loyalty, and trust in His power, with the claims 
justified in the worship of faithful men. And 
His claims are hindered with the weakness of 
each intercessor who fails to witness to His 
power of good-will toward others. Each needy 
man should not only be linked up individually 
with God, but needy, partial men should be 
bound, directly, one to another with the im¬ 
mediate binding presence and power of God in 
them. 

We have considered the aid of intercession 
not only as asking the God of the needy man 

[ 49 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


to aid the needy one but as asking the God of our 
life to help others. We reach up to God and He 
does not reach out to men without us, but rather 
with His life-giving presence at work in our 
faith. Of course it may be that the one whom 
God helps with His Providence and Saviourliood 
does not know that we prayed or that our 
prayer has helped him. There may or may not 
be some sense of human fellowship as the con¬ 
verted one responds to God. But we would not 
expect to prove with clinic methods just how 
we helped in prayer — and how much we helped. 
We need only be convinced that it is our nature 
and our task to help in this great way. 

We have considered that there is one inter¬ 
pretation of intercession which concludes that 
we reach God; and God hears the call and 
reaches men we pray for, — but without us. We 
have seen further that what we believe to be the 
accurate and more nearly complete interpreta¬ 
tion of intercession is that we reach up to God, 
and God reaches out to others, taking us with 
Him. That is, He takes our faith with Him. 
And that means: He takes His Selfhood in us 

[50] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 


to others, so far as we are able in faith to be 
independent of time and space. 

But let us consider now that we not only can 
not distinguish between the work of our faith 
and the instigating Spirit of the Intercessor in 
our faith, but further that we can not dis¬ 
tinguish, in power and immediacy, between the 
Source Life Who is in our very souls that plead 
and the same Source Life Who aids others for 
whom we pray. Distances and directions make 
spiritual oneness difficult to think, in our ordi¬ 
nary unspiritual temper of mind. Would that we 
could think from the standpoint of the God 
within us; of His Oneness, and of our oneness 
(as praying, faithful men) with all others we 
pray for; but only so far, — so truly, so power¬ 
fully as we are in Him, and are in soul-etfort 
the showing forth of His force in humanity. 
This means that the God in me is the social, 
inclusive Saviour Who shows Himself to some 
needy man; and that that ‘part’ and force of 
His fulness given to me must not be denied to 
another by unbelief and sloth in me. 

My failure as intercessor is no less than my 
practical denial that God is Intercessory Power 


[5i] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


in me. For if He be in me, in a Christian sense 
and force, He must be in me as Intercessor, as 
Saviour. This means that He must work through 
me to the extent that He dwells in me as Inter¬ 
cessor, as Saviour. I must share Him as Inter¬ 
cessor or else lose His Intercessory Spirit. If 
His Intercessory Nature can not work through 
me, I block Him, and He must work ‘ around 
me/ — apart from me; and, because my part 
is real, without the same direct and full effect 
upon others as if His Source Life reached out 
from me. I become a failure as an intercessory 
agency — a piece of useless machinery whose 
chance and nature it would have been, if at 
work, to help others with my witnessing energy 
and reach of faith towards them. 

Now, the new force on which our Lord insisted 
(and in one place could do no mighty work 
because He did not find it) did not seem to be 
only belief that He was the Saviour of their 
friends, but also belief that the Saviour’s way 
of saving their friends was by the pleading 
activity of their faith, in the friends’ behalf. 
‘ 1 Seeing their faith;’ 9 their faith presented men 
to Christ — whether or not present in body; 

[ 52 ] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 


whether or not those to be helped in body or 
soul were as yet men of faith. The cure of soul 
or body did not depend only on the Saviour’s 
knowing of the need, but on the faith of men 
being practical and active enough to bring 
friends to Him and to hold them close to Him, 
and to take their part and plead their case. 

We are told that we have the thing we pray 
for, if we pray in Christ’s Spirit. For the ad¬ 
vocating interceding Spirit in us is the aiding, 
supplying Spirit in the one prayed for; He is 
the out-reaching, responding Holy Spirit Who 
accepts and takes up the other’s cause. Since 
the Spirit of Christ is not a house divided 
against itself He aids as Intercessor in us and 
as Saviour in those pleaded for. “ Speak the 
word only and my servant shall be healed.” 
See Lord, I have brought my servant to Thee 
already in my faith, so it is not of consequence 
that Thou shouldst go to him in body. And the 
Saviour marvelled at so great faith. The 
soldier’s faith in Jesus not only brought him 
very close to Jesus, but made his servant so 
close by his connecting faith that though phy¬ 
sical distance separated, Jesus could put out 

[ 53 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

the ‘finger’ of the Spirit and touch the sick 
one. He did not have to journey to him in body 
because the Centurion had used something other 
than bodily activity in bringing the servant to 
Jesus. He used his faith-reach. So Jesus 
(along with the faith-attitude of the pleading 
soldier) was spiritually present to the sick man 
and healed him. 

But we shall think further of ‘ presence ’ in 
a later chapter. Does it not increase the joy 
of praying to feel that when we hold others 
close to us with intelligent sympathy, in inti¬ 
macy of intercessory spirit, they are really pres¬ 
ent with us in the Holy Spirit? And so the 
interceding Spirit moves upon them in our inter¬ 
ceding spirit. For He is the Mover of our 
intercession. He stimulates our desires towards 
others. He is the Spirit of our quest for needy 
men in intercession. The very act of our plead¬ 
ing, as a movement of the instigating Spirit in 
us, is the act of the Spirit (Whom we are apt 
to think of as emanating from a far-off God¬ 
head) already moving towards them out of that 
fulness of His presence which we share. 

Those thus prayed for may reject His Provi- 


[ 54 ] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 

dence and Saviourhood. Yet God’s force of 
saving might may be brought to bear on them 
by some working together of events and con¬ 
ditions through Christian fellowship and the 
directing ‘ finger’ of God, so that even apart 
from the co-operating will of those for whom 
we pray they may be aided of God. Very fre¬ 
quently men have felt some unexplained impulse 
to do good; some feeling that they are of value 
to others; some intimation of a protecting 
Providence; some sense of fellowship enlight¬ 
ening them. The faith-force of interceding 
Christians, bent on aiding men, is no fad or 
fancy. It means that God has committed Him¬ 
self to the plan of using men’s faith as His own 
handiwork and instrument of healing. Apart 
from men’s prayer-life, they can stop or hinder 
God’s saving power in others in many ways; 
through their evil influences; the false trails 
they point out to others; the selfish, sensual 
will they impose upon others. Or, by leadership 
and example, men can encourage and inspire 
others with the very virtue and spirit of the 
Christ-life. This is but the plain fact of daily 
living. But we need here the view-point that 

[55] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

in our life of faith, because in all our life, we 
are in fact and of necessity a hurting or a saving 
agency for our fellows. 

If our Lord is an Intercessor Who ever liveth 
to make intercession; and if we possess and use 
His Spirit, with His energy and will of inter¬ 
cession, must we not count as intercessors? 
4 ‘For their sakes I consecrate myself.” “I have 
given you an example. ’ ’ Must not our pleading- 
make a difference, then? Is not the force of 
intercessory sympathy we use for others a tell¬ 
ing influence? Our God goes to men we pray 
for even in us and through us, as we hold men 
close and plead to our Father for them. Thus, 
finding the interceding God in the deep of our 
own life as the Saving Lord of others, we de¬ 
clare this great truth to others who are beyond 
physical reach but one with us in the carrying 
Spirit of God. For our pleading to God for 
them has in it the element of declaring God’s 
power to them — so instant is the working of 
the God within us in behalf of those for whom 
we plead. “As thou, father, art in me, and I 
in thee that they also may be one in us Inter¬ 
cession is that activity of our social faith which 


[ 56 ] 


FAITH-REACH IN INTERCESSION 

enables the Spirit of God to make us one in 
Him. 

The truth we have sought to utter is difficult 
indeed to express; not because it is attenuated 
theory but because there is no sufficient vocabu¬ 
lary for the light and force of Spirit within us 
which we intuitively grasp. We are attempting 
to make plain from several angles that we can 
not take what the Communion of Saints means 
out of our most personal and direct sense of 
God. The more perfectly I know Him, the more 
fully I have the Spirit of His universal 
humanity and His quality of fellowship. I 
know Him more and more as the God. of man¬ 
kind, Who holds all men in His heart. We are 
able to rejoice in a fuller revelation and force 
of God within our souls when the meaning of 
intercession becomes deeper and more clarified. 
The more we use intercession the more real the 
Intercessor becomes to us. For the force that 
gives power to others through us is the force 
that has become able within our souls. To see 
Christ, through faith that is at work in inter¬ 
cession, is to see Him as St. John saw Him on 
Patmos in the midst of worshippers and 


[57] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


workers — inseparable from the Communion of 
Saints. To turn our back on those for whom 
the Intercessor died is to turn against the Spirit 
of the Intercessor in our own life, Whose 
nature it is to plead for men in need. We would 
actually turn against the Lord Himself, Who 
will not be separated from His work and pres¬ 
ence in men everywhere. So intercession tests 
the spirit and the force of our religious 
experience. 


CHAPTER X 


Our Lord as Intercessor 

I F WE read through the Old Testament 
records of the Jewish tribal life, and on 
through their history as a nation, we find 
this assured fact: that the Hebrews were a 
people who pleaded to God for others. Prophet, 
priest, king, psalmist and historian, express 
belief that God aids men through the prayers 
of their fellows. Moses and the prophets plead 
to God with strong yearning for their apostate 
people. The Psalms breathe the very spirit of 
intercession as a great, characteristic effort of 
faith. It is one of the chief reasons for the 
hold the Psalms have had upon Christian ex¬ 
perience. Thus did intercession pave the way in 
the spirit-touched social instincts of the Jews 
for the advent of Messiah as Intercessor. 

Then when our Lord came He emphasized 
intercession as one of the fundamental means 
of service. He taught His disciples by word, 
and by the acid test of His own death, to pray 

[ 59 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


even for their persecutors. And this torch of 
spirit-light and energy He handed on to His 
followers. So Stephen, in his Master’s Spirit, 
intercedes for his murderers. St. Paul exhorts 
that ‘intercessions he made for all men’ .... 

‘ This is good and acceptable in the sight of God 
our Saviour/ Throughout the New Testament 
the record is that men able to commune in spirit 
with God pleaded for the safety and freedom 
of other souls from sin and physical danger. 
They bear witness that the gates of sense-life 
and self-life yielded and swung back readily 
before belief that worked through them as inter¬ 
cessors. Their effort in prayer for others 
became God’s own will and ableness to help 
those prayed for. 

But it is in the example and life of the great 
Intercessor Himself that we find unalloyed 
both the sanity and the force of pleading. Here 
our thinking — resting in records of Holy Writ 
beyond all dispute — rejoices in Him. There 
can be no question that intercession is a way 
He advocates and uses. It is a way in which He 
helped men when He took our flesh. “Simon, 
Simon, behold Satan asked to have you that he 

[ 60 ] 


OUR LORD AS INTERCESSOR 

might sift you as wheat: but 1 made supplication 
for thee that thy faith fail not; and do thou 
when once thou hast turned again establish thy 
brethren. ” Let us recall that it was in the 
power of His transfiguring intercession that 
this joyous thing happened: Moses and Elijah 
appeared and talked with Him of His saving 
purpose and plans for the race. They spoke of 
His sacrificial death. It was His interceding 
love that was moving Him to Gethsemane and 
the Cross. 

For is it not plain that our Lord’s inter¬ 
cessory prayers were of the same quality and 
force of spirit as His blood-shedding for men! 
In both was the activity of Saviour-nature. We 
find His utmost will to give Himself revealed 
on the Cross. But what we see plainly there 
on Calvary was also genuinely and dominantly 
at work in His intercessions. Here also was 
Saviour-force producing results, though not so 
plain to the eye or to the unspiritual heart of 
man. 

Yet what deep wells of living water to refresh 
men’s faith do we find in the intercessory 
energy of the Son of Man. As He prayed He 

m 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

was transfigured on the Mount. And after the 
day’s work of teaching, and healing sense- 
enslaved men, He shared His burdens and His 
purposes with the Father in the night-watches, 
and pleaded for His brethren. Though Him¬ 
self the great Missionary to Earth, He taught 
men to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send 
forth laborers. With high-priestly power when 
the Last Discourse was ended did He intercede 
for His friends and for those who should be¬ 
lieve on Him through their word. Then in 
Gethsemane there came upon Him the spiritual 
agony of the last sacrifice; the timeless reach 
of His soul through the deeps of death and hell, 
for the souls of His people — for you and me. 

So, without possible question, after a plain 
reading of the record, we find that intercession 
was one of Christ’s great ways of helping and 
saving men. And he sets for men this task of 
intercession that made His life sometimes shine 
with the glory of the Spirit, and sometimes 
spend itself in sleepless nights and agony of 
appeal. It was in the midst of His great inter¬ 
cessory prayer, when His tense soul had or¬ 
dained the sacrament of His own blood-shedding 


[62] 


OUR LORD AS INTERCESSOR 

and spirit-giving, that He cried out to the 
Father: “For their sakes I sanctify (conse¬ 
crate) myself that they themselves also may be 
sanctified in truth.” To fail to consecrate our¬ 
selves in the Spirit of His intercession is to 
deny our Lord. 

There come times when we find slipping from 
us our belief in the power of prayer for others. 
A staggering barrage of doubt seems to cut us 
off from any real, intelligent faith in inter¬ 
cession. Carping criticisms and earth-born 
objections screech through the air and burst 
near us like exploding shells. Morale is lowered 
or shot to pieces. The soul hesitates in the 
no-man’s land of lukewarmness. How bracing, 
then, to think our way in definite fashion to the 
interceding Christ who consecrated this way for 
us. We become nerved to carry on in loyal 
soldier-spirit. For in intercession He becomes 
for us ‘ ‘ The Way. ” Thus we have the vantage- 
ground of our Lord’s own experience and com¬ 
mand to us, in our effort to think and feel and 
believe the force He permits us to wield in 
intercession. 

On the Isle of Patmos, St. John saw the 
[ 63 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Christ of history in glorious vision. But it was 
the glory of a saving Lord Who would not 
separate Himself from His people. “He ever 
liveth to make intercession for us.” For He 
communes with the Father as One Who holds 
all men in His heart; asking that the Father 
shall not see Him apart from men He would 
redeem; and that the Father shall see His 
“sheep” only in Him. For it is the nature of 
His Spirit of fellowship (that reaches out 
toward the Father, yet ever with deep concern 
for us) to include us in His self-giving, and to 
draw us into that oneness which He has with 
the Father. And when men possess this uni¬ 
versal Spirit of Christ’s fellowship it must work 
in them as in Christ; and they too must plead 
for their brethren. 


[64] 


CHAPTER XI 


The Spirit of Christ 

O UR way to Christ, and our way to find 
the worth of Christ’s intercession, is 
through the Holy Spirit. Yet many 
thoughtful Christians are perplexed as to the 
respective work of the Holy Spirit and Christ 
Jesus. ‘ 4 When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, 
he will guide you into all truth .... for he shall 
receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.” 
And again: “God hath sent forth the Spirit of 
his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. ” 
Here the agency of the Holy Spirit is empha¬ 
sized. But then, when we accept this presence 
of Christ in the Spirit and through the Spirit, 
Jesus adds: “I will not leave you comfortless: 
1 will come to you . 9 9 And again, it is recorded: 
“Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the 
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Is it 
then the Lord, or the Spirit of the Lord Who is 
present in us as the force of intercession? 


[65] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


The answer lies in the gospel of God’s fulness 
and unity, which has too often been poorly 
stated in ancient and modern Christian writ¬ 
ings. Christ tells us: “He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father.’ ’ This is true because 
“I am in the Father, and the Father in me.” 
And this in turn could be possible only because 
of the gospel of God’s oneness: “I and the 
Father are one. ’ ’ As with the oneness of pres¬ 
ence so with the oneness of force. The Son 
of Man can do nothing of Himself “but what 
he seeth the Father do; ” but this is everything, 
since whatever “the Father doeth the Son doeth 
also.” This applies to each Person of the 
Trinity in terms of the nature and love-energy 
of each of the other Persons of the Trinity. So 
Christ could say at one time, ‘I am present in 
you, ’ and again, ‘ My Spirit is present in you. ’ 
For He is most perfectly present in us when the 
Holy Spirit (His Home-Life and Companionship 
in God) most perfectly enables us to perceive 
His presence. We can not separate or isolate 
the Persons of the Trinity, or attribute certain 
qualities and powers to one which we deny to 
another. Nor can we say that one Person of 


[66] 


THE SPIRIT OP CHRIST 

the Trinity is present in the heart of man while 
the Other is far off yonder in the heavens. 

Now, to Whom shall we pray? Doubtless to 
God as Father, as Son, as Holy Ghost, or as 
Triune God. For these facts about God’s nature 
we gained through our Lord’s revelation. And 
there can be no jealousy in the Godhead if we 
pray to one or the other Person of the Trinity. 
Yet, when we seek to claim the force of God’s 
presence, and to employ our Christian exper¬ 
ience for others in intercession, we naturally 
seek the characteristic Christian way to God: 
we pray to the Father as the Fountain-head of 
all life; we pray to Christ as Saviour and Inter¬ 
cessor ; we pray to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit 
Who sustained Christ’s humanity, and Who 
shows Him unto us. We understand that in the 
Spirit, and as the Spirit of His life, Christ is 
not only with us but in us. 

So it is perfectly clear that there is more 
than one way of stating the presence of the One 
God. And what sometimes seems a looseness 
and even a contradiction of record in the New 
Testament, about the way God is in our life, is, 
in fact, but a wealth of ways open to us by 

[ 67 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


which to approach the fulness of the Godhead. 
If the Holy Spirit is in us, as the Spirit of 
Christ’s revealed humanity, then in all exact¬ 
ness, Christ is present. 

But though God fulfills Himself in us in many 
ways, and permits more than one approach to 
Him, yet we believe that we shall most readily 
realize and employ God’s force as intercessors 
when we approach the Father pleading the 
Spirit of Christ’s incarnate life. We do not seek 
the Spirit of God with vagueness, or in a gen¬ 
eral way as the Giver-of-life Who brooded over 
the waters, and lighteth every man. We plead 
Christ’s plan of action, and His felt ableness to 
carry out His plans in the Holy Spirit. 

We know that Christ was not perfectly pres¬ 
ent to His own disciples, in an inner, creative 
way, until the meaning and force of His daily 
life was in them as the Holy Spirit. So He told 
them it was expedient for them that He go away. 
Then He would be not only with them, but in 
them. Then all He meant to them, would, 
after Pentecost, have the mighty urge of 
Eternal force. It is possible for once-born men 
to have a picture of Christ in their minds; to 
[ 68 ] 


THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST 


know His teachings and make some attempt to 
follow Him, and yet not to have the revelation 
of the Holy Spirit taking of the things of Christ 
and showing them to the human spirit and 
human energies in a way that produces human 
loyalty and service. 

As Christians, then, we pray for the Holy 
Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, which He had and 
still has and imparts to us. We would not only 
see the mental picture of the historical Christ 
(apart from the Spirit), nor would we pray 
for the gift of the Spirit without thought or 
vision of Christ. But we pray that the Spirit, 
as the Spirit of our Lord , shall invigor¬ 
ate and inspire us with Christa Saviour-and- 
Intercessor force of mission and fellowship. We 
would not fall short (in our communion with 
Christ and the effort to do His work) of the 
Holy Spirit—yet not as the Spirit of Nature, or 
of natural Providence, or of Old Testament 
revelation only; but as the Spirit of Whom 
Christ says: ‘I will send Him unto you and He 
shall take of mine and shall show it unto you, 
and I will be in you. ’ It is not that the Spirit 
brings long-distance messages of love and power 

[69] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

from a far-off Christ, but that the Spirit dis¬ 
closes the reality and immediateness of the 
present spiritual Christ. Ours is the religion 
of the Incarnation. We concentrate mind and 
loyalty on Christ as we pray for His Spirit of 
intercession. 

Consider the Spirit’s work in Christ. Jesus 
was begotten of the Holy Spirit. His ministry 
was inaugurated at His baptism in the Holy 
Spirit. He went forth into the wilderness 
Spirit-led and came forth again to His work 
of Saviourhood in the power of the Spirit. 
Through the Eternal Spirit, as the Epistle to 
the Hebrews tells us, has the great Sacrifice 
offered Himself to the Father. St. Paul assures 
us that the “Spirit itself maketh intercession.” 

When Jesus prayed for men — concentrated 
His mind and energy in the task of intercession 
— it was in the power of the Spirit. When men 
who call Him Lord fail to intercede for their 
brethren it means that the Holy Spirit is not 
the intercessory force through them that He 
actually was and is in Christ. This means, in 
turn, some failure to share Christ’s Spirit, and 
hence to know Christ spiritually. 


[7o] 


THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST 


Now if the Church is really the Spirit-filled, 
witness-bearing Body of Christ, she must carry 
on after her kind. Christ’s wisdom and energy 
is her life without fear or doubt. She must 
live as intercessor or deny her birth-right in 
His Intercessory Spirit. For St. Paul makes 
it plain that the Spirit of Christ makes inter¬ 
cessions with groanings that can not be uttered. 
The Master shows this Spirit on the Mount, in 
Gethsemane, on the Cross. The Spirit waits to 
make intercessions for other men in us 
—through us — who pray to the great 
Intercessor; or, sharing and pleading the Inter¬ 
cessor J s Spirit, lift our hearts in supplication 
to the Father. 

So, failure to intercede is the fundamental 
failure to worship the Intercessor intelligently 
and in spirit. For He consecrated Himself for 
us — as Intercessor — and as Consecrator (as 
One Who shows forth this way and kind of life) 
bids us pray to the Lord of the Harvest. The 
Holy Spirit offers to us as a gift of His creative 
energy and as an opportunity of service, that 
experience and habit of interceding which 
Christ had and which He still has, and which 


[7i] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

He seeks through the same Spirit to impart to 
us. 

St. Paul could say in all exactness: “I live, 
yet not I, but Christ:’ ’ so inseparable and one in 
nature was the spirit of his life and the Spirit 
of Christ’s life in him. Then is it strange that 
human language can not express ‘ separateness’ 
and 4 independence of action 9 between Christ and 
the Holy Spirit; between the Spirit of Christ’s 
life as Christ the Lord, and the Spirit of His 
life as the Holy Spirit — since God is One, and 
All in All. If man (spiritualized as St. Paul) 
can not distinguish between himself and God, 
how could our Lord put into words that we 
could understand distinctions in the Godhead 
of perfect Oneness. And that Oneness is the 
creative force of life in us. But we know God 
best and use His force most ably as Christ has 
revealed Him: when in our souls the Spirit of 
the Son of Man reaches out at once to God and 
to men we plead for, crying, 4 ‘Our Father.” 


[ 72 ] 


CHAPTER XII 


With the Intercessor as Saviour 

PART from Christ Himself all the 
rationale of intercession will have the 



hollow sound of mere logic and labored 
theory. All approaches to God, all efforts to 
become spiritual, must keep men’s relation to 
the Son of Man simple and definite. Else we 
have only the statement of religion rather than 
religion itself. 

In his study “Looking Inwards,” Edward 
Shillito has this strong way of stating the case: 
‘ ‘ In Christ we shall know that there meet, fused 
in one awful energy of love, all that we have 
ever prayed ourselves, all that others have ever 
prayed for us during the long years of life, all 
the prayers of the dead and of the living, and 
the eternal intercessions of Him Who loved us 
even unto death. All are answered in the 
unseen Arm that upholds us — in the pierced 
Hands which are lifting us over the ford.” 

The closer we get to the great Intercessor 


[73] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Who inspires ns and commands ns, the plainer 
and more worth while will seem the task set 
before us. Even as we wonder and reason, if we 
do in fact draw closer to Him, His Spirit of 
intercession will possess ns and move out 
through our prayers toward men in need. We 
partake of the spiritual impulses of our inter¬ 
ceding Lord. We pray that His Spirit shall 
make us feel the kindred touch of the Inter¬ 
cessor Himself. 

The fact that our Lord constantly intercedes 
for us means that He is actively our Saviour. 
The Son of Man communes with the Father in 
our nature which He has taken. That nature 
which Christ has is one with that of all men 
everywhere. When He communes with the 
Father it is in the force of human life that 
reaches through the race in great compassion. 
The Father sees the Spirit of the Son reaching 
toward man and through man to lift mankind 
up even as this same Spirit of the Son draws 
toward the Father in close communion and 
fellowship. This means that Christ communes 
with the Father, not alone outside of us, but 
within us. And when His Spirit of humanity 


[74] 


WITH THE INTERCESSOR AS SAVIOUR 

thus has fellowship with the Father in us He 
draws man toward God, the Father, in a great 
constraint of pleading love. This is what 
Christa intercession for us means as it works 
within us. It is what His Saviourhood means. 

So the Father sees men, who believe, in 
Christ. He is lifting them up toward God. It 
is a fellowship of the Son with the Father in 
which the Son is seen by the Father as reaching 
down and putting His Arm around man. He 
says in His fellowship with the Father: “of 
those whom thou has given me have I lost 
none.” 

The Father Himself loveth us. The Master 
does not seek for us some pardon and cure 
which the Father is reluctant to grant. It 
means rather that His Saviourhood is still at 
work in the life of God as it was at work in 
the life of God in the days of His flesh. Inter¬ 
cession was one of His ways of salvation, of 
reach at once toward the Father and men, when 
He walked on earth as Saviour: it is still. 

What strong, joyful assurance — that men 
who have the Master’s Spirit of intercession 
are caught up into His communion with the 

[75] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Father! They have actual part and work in the 
fulness of His moving love that reaches through 
men toward the Father. For the Father com¬ 
munes with the Son; not only in His eternal 
Sonship but in the outpouring of that Sonship 
that gives itself to men. So, being in man, and 
one in fellowship with men, whose nature He 
has, He does not turn from them in His con¬ 
stant Self-giving to the Father. He gives Him¬ 
self in fellowship to the Father through men; 
presenting us to God as His friends. 

Now when the greatness of this inspiring 
truth is felt it must mean not only personal joy, 
but a constraining sense of mission to other 
men in sharing Christ’s Saviourhood which we 
claim and feel. “As thou, Father, art in me, 
and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.” 
Not, we see, that ‘I may present each one sep¬ 
arately to Thee, 0 Father, in the oneness of 
Our fellowship,’ but that the ‘sense of Our 
spiritual oneness in each man may give him that 
spirit of oneness with other men that I have 
with Thee/ Each one shall not only have His 
Spirit of response to the Father but His Spirit 
of fellowship toward all other men — the 


[76] 


WITH THE INTERCESSOR AS SAVIOUR 

quality, the force, the mission of His social, uni¬ 
versal Nature that holds all men in His heart 
and presents to the Father each life as a sharer 
in His family Spirit. 

So our intercessions for others when in His 
Spirit — what are they but the inspiration of 
His all-inclusive Spirit doing His characteristic 
work in us — as us — who can say with St. 
Paul: “I, yet, not I, but Christ. ,, When His 
Spirit of Saviourhood can not act through us 
in intercession, then only in some very limited 
way does He make Himself known to us. As 
the Intercessor He is one with the Father. Are 
we one with Him (one in His Spirit of com¬ 
munion with the Father) in intercession for 
men? “My Father worketh hitherto and I 
work. ’’ If He does not work in us and through 
us as intercessors, is not His entrance into our 
lives delimited, or barred? Will He consent to 
abide in us as an unworking, unable Spirit of 
life — an incompetent force? If the Spirit of 
the Intercessor is in us at all, must not His 
Spirit do His characteristic work through us? 
“Pray ye the Lord of the Harvest/’ 

People sometimes say that they have been 

[77] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


taught to pray for others, and so accept the 
duty as a part of the Christian life. But they 
add that they do not really believe it accomp¬ 
lishes anything. Of course the formal exercise 
of remembering others before God without near¬ 
ness to Christ in Spirit and without faith in 
His power to work through us is not Christian 
intercession. We can only share the breath of 
the Spirit. We claim the Spirit is able through 
us. So we count with God as intercessors in 
this mighty way. We are one with the Christ 
in us reaching toward the Father, and also one 
with the Christ in us reaching throughout 
humanity — in the same impulse and force of 
Spirit. 



[78] 


CHAPTER XIII 


Power of Oneness 

4 DOWER in intercession’ is the whole 
theme of this book — this call to service. 
The study is a challenge throughout to 
believe that there is spiritual power in our faith 
when we intercede. The power is ‘not of our¬ 
selves ’ and yet is ‘of ourselves.’ We can of 
ourselves do nothing, and yet, as Tennyson 
declares, “more things are wrought by prayer 
than this world dreams of.” For the effectual 
fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth 
much. And we can do all things through Christ 
Who strengtheneth us. “Greater works than 
these shall he do; because I go unto the Father. ’ ’ 
Intercession is one of the great works of Christ 
which we are entrusted to share with Him. 

We keep the Christ before us, as Leader, in 
reverent loyalty. We plead for His Spirit as 
we know of that Spirit at work in His Human¬ 
ity. In His Spirit we pray to the Father for 
men. As we do so we can not distinguish 


[79] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


between ourselves and the Holy Spirit in us. 
“I live yet not I.” “For to me to live is 
Christ.’ ’ “I am the least of the Apostles: — by 
the grace of God 1 labored more abundantly 
than they all. ,, So exclaims the great Apostle. 
He seeks to put into words, that register his 
experience, what the great Intercessor prayed: 
“As thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that 
they also may be one in us.” It is this power 
of oneness that makes men conscious of their 
weakness, — also conscious of their greatness. 
For the Spirit of our Lord is in us, with inten¬ 
tion, with trust in us, with will that has the 
human quality and force of His humanity work¬ 
ing in us, and yet bent on aiding others beyond 
us. 

There is, then, a oneness of God’s plan of 
responsive self-giving that we have a part in, 
in intercession. In any figure there is too much 
of the space — the locality — element to indi¬ 
cate more than dimly God’s eternal life and 
plan in us. What do ‘distances’ mean in the 
one presence of God in Whom we live! Yet 
Christ spoke of going away and coming again. 
And so we may do so also to indicate degrees of 


[80] 


POWER OF ONENESS 


quality and of ableness in spiritual fellowship. 
We can translate such time and space figures 
into rich and full spiritual experience by in¬ 
sight and intuition, although words may baffle 
us. 

Let us think in distances thus: we pray to 
God with living faith. It is the Holy Spirit in 
us Who lifts our faith and plan of service God- 
ward. In response, the Holy Spirit in the God¬ 
head, as the Spirit of the great Intercessor, 
reaches down to meet and answer the Holy 
Spirit in us Who has become one with our plead¬ 
ing spirit. Then the Spirit of our life, as we 
pray, and the Spirit of Christa life, as He 
responds, reach out as one succoring Spirit 
toward the man in need. 

Now Christ tells us that when we pray in faith 
to God we have the thing we pray for. If, then, 
we can think out of existence the time element 
we can realize that the petition to God and the 
answer from God as He grants the prayer foi 
another — is all one immediate movement or 
force of the one Spirit. And if we can think 
out of existence the space element we will rea¬ 
lize that the Spirit in us praying , in God answer - 
[81] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


ing, and in the one prayed for (receiving the 
answer) is all one act and energy of divine 
Self-giving. 

So when the Spirit of God reaches the one 
prayed for the Spirit is not exactly the same 
force for him as if we had not prayed. Our 
prayer really counts. For the Spirits power 
clothed as human faith has a part in the suc¬ 
coring. It is the God-Who-has-not-left-us-out 
Who is helping others that they without us 
should not be made perfect. 

It is a marvelous and powerful use of men 
when the Holy Spirit, Who includes human 
intercessors within His Oneness will not declare 
Himself impotent in them , because He is joined 
with them as Spirit. It may be that this fact 
will be filled with richness of meaning by think¬ 
ing of the soul's social nature. If the Master's 
Spirit possesses me in intercession He possesses 
my sympathy, my affection, my yearning toward 
those I hold in my heart as I pray. Then if the 
Master's Spirit satisfies me in the spiritual com¬ 
munion I hold with Him in intercession, He 
must needs satisfy this social self of mine, which 
is seeking in active fashion to share itself and 
[82] 


POWER OF ONENESS 


its good things with others. Now, these social 
impulses, as they plead to God and for men, are 
no other than the faith of the social self which 
God, the Spirit, transfigures and uses. 

But how are these social impulses — the faith- 
impulse of our social selves — used of God? 
Are they instigated of God Who inspires our 
praying? They must be. How then could they 
be dissipated, unsatisfied, by the Holy Spirit 
before they accomplished their mission of 
prayer? The Spirit of Christ Who will not 
forsake us nor give His aid to men prayed for 
without us, has in the Oneness of His nature 
as He aids others, our kindred touch of 
sympathy — our spirit of mission to others. 


[83] 


CHAPTER XIV 


God's Plan in Intekcession 

B ECAUSE men of faith are akin to God 
and consciously share His nature, it fol¬ 
lows that they share His work. But 
God's work necessitates method and plan of 
action. Our intercession is, first and last, God's 
plan. 

What, then, does this involve? Our petition 
for another means that we present to God our 
plan for Him to follow in helping our brother. 
But, it can not mean that we bring news to God 
about some human need which He did not really 
know about, or had overlooked! And it can not 
mean that we correct our God by suggesting 
that His care for another is faulty. And 
further, we do not seek to change the Lord's 
plan for another so as to conform it to our 
notions. This would bring God's wisdom down 
to our folly. 

Our plan of action for others in prayer must 
be intelligently and intensely realized by us, as 
[ 84 ] 


GOD’S PLAN IN INTERCESSION 

we pray, as God’s plan. And the greater our 
prevailing might as intercessors, the more truly 
do we become Christ’s plan of action. If we be 
Christian, whatsoever we ask is in Christ’s 
instigating sympathy and good-will toward 
men. How, then, would it be possible to inform 
God concerning that which He Himself inspires 
us to ask! We are prepared, then, for these 
words of George Matheson: “Efficacious prayer 
is not so much a petition as a prophecy; it is 
my Father saying to me ‘ This is My Will; ask 
this.’ ” 

So we realize that man as pleader and advo¬ 
cate does not come to God with certain altruistic 
plans for others which He, the Creator and 
Redeemer of men, has not Himself considered 
and determined upon. It is rather that the 
Father of men made us with intercessory 
natures, and that our prayer-wish for others 
is a definite part of Christ’s programme of 
reaching men. He works through those human 
connections of faith-sympathy of man for man. 
This is one of His plans for communicating His 
abundant life to others. Hence our failure to 
intercede is the failure of His plan in us. 


[85] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Jesus seeks to instill in all His people His 
own Kingdom-founding Spirit. His Kingdom 
means the establishing of timeless, spiritual, 
relations among men who are one with Him. 
And we are the nearer in nature to Him, the 
greater our capacity of soul to realize and mul¬ 
tiply spiritual relations. “He is most like 
Christ who, like Him, holds the whole world 
in his heart. ’ ’ This missionary slogan is equally 
a challenge to an unshackled faith in inter¬ 
cession. Zeal in intercession is a very accurate 
gauge as to how free and able men are in the 
spiritual Kingdom of God’s love. 

Hence we are concerned with a time-free, 
space-free fellowship to which God has com¬ 
mitted Himself. He depends on men of His 
Spirit to carry it out. It is indeed wonderful 
that God should rely on our pleading for our 
brethren to realize the fulness of His joy in 
fellowship. We may ask why God needs our 
frail force toward other men (as shown in inter¬ 
cession) to satisfy Him? Why, in all the celes¬ 
tial hosts, that surround God in joyous fellow¬ 
ship, should He miss my tiny weight of service 
in intercession? 


[ 86 ] 


GOD’S PLAN IN INTERCESSION 

As an academic problem in “ probability and 
chance’ ’ it seems indeed most probable that the 
Father of men could have found some other way 
of satisfying His mutual, self-giving nature 
without creating man with his capacity and 
mission for spiritual fellowship. But the per¬ 
tinent fact is this: because God has made us as 
we are, we have been given a real place and 
part in His fulness and work. We are, in fact, 
made that way. Hence, our worth is realized as 
men who are able to know God and serve Him 
with the force of His intercessory Spirit bent 
on the carrying out of intelligent, constructive 
plans. 

It will greatly help us to think of our inter¬ 
cessions against the background of God’s full¬ 
ness and our quest for fulfillment. With such an 
approach it can not seem a strained or strange 
thing to believe that our intercessions are an 
integral part of God’s plan for others. He has 
made men with natures that can come fully to 
Him only when they come to Him with others, 
and through others. To realize in themselves 
the quality of His fulness they must realize it 
with others, and through others, in Him. And 
[ 87 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


this force of God’s fulness, which men feel they 
must share with others before they can realize 
it in themselves , must have value, usefulness, 
a sense of mission, efficiency in them. They 
must believe and realize that their pleading 
spirit, yearning toward others in the abundance 
of God’s fulness in them, counts, — works 
through them. Intercession has this use and 
plan. 

So we must conclude as Christians (from the 
psychology and philosophy of our inmost 
nature) that the communion which the Father 
holds with us must needs be in our communion 
with others. The social wealth of God’s life 
touches each individual who believes. But it 
can not be satisfied, or satisfy us, except as it 
is seeking to realize itself in others through us. 
We must have a social joy in God; the joy of 
sharing a missionary spirit. Else there is no 
real spiritual joy at all. 

Is it not a very searching thought that the 
full force and worth of God’s love can not be 
only in us, severally; and so realized by us. 
This is the way of separation from God, of 
denial, of spiritual death. This means the lack 
[ 88 ] 


GOD’S PLAN IN INTERCESSION 


of God’s spiritual plan, and force of progress, 
in men. He must needs spiritualize, and hold 
communion with, our social instincts and social 
energies actually at work, or else have no 
deep communion and fellowship with us at 
all. We must know Him as He is and 
respond to Him as He has made us. This is 
the revelation, and our mission: “As Thou, 
Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also 
may he one in us.” So God filleth all in all — 
that each may be made more and more perfect 
in increased capacity for fellowship with all 
others. 

Surely there can be no training so valuable 
for the time-and-space-free fellowship of heaven 
as the exercise of our spirits in that fellowship 
here and now in intercession. We have but to 
claim now that we are in spirit-nature the self- 
beginnings of that same kind of life we shall 
be beyond death. So, tearing down the screens 
of space apartments and the restrictions of time 
acts, we claim the immediacy of spiritual 
fellowship in the One Spirit Who is wont to act 
as one in each of us and so share His nature in 
us with others through our intercessions. 


m 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


It is at once humbling and inspiring to pene¬ 
trate, so far as we may, more and more deeply 
into God’s revealed plan as He works through 
men’s intercessions. But, it is better still to 
put into practice God’s plan to help others 
through our prayers. For God will bless 
another because of my feeble weight of good¬ 
will in praying! God will not disregard His 
own Spirit of abundant life moving through our 
social natures as spiritual beings. Together, in 
the sharing of His Spirit, with force of con¬ 
structive sympathy, men become the Kingdom 
of the Incarnate One. There is no detailed 
human plan. The force of one Spirit uses men 
as they are, and where they are, that we all 
may be one in the Spirit, in the fullest use of 
our social natures. Intercession is the plan of 
God. 


[ 90 ] 


CHAPTER XV 


Special Providence 

W E ARE prone to ask questions of our¬ 
selves and to make problems in religion 
out of them — which in fact are not 
only, or chiefly, religious matters at all. With 
some sense of hurt justice we ask ourselves 
questions like these: if God depends upon my 
intercessions to help another, does not this 
make my responsibility too great? And does 
it not leave the welfare of another too largely 
in human hands? Is it possible that God re¬ 
quires the scales to tip in favor of another’s 
good only because of the tiny weight of my 
praying? If the Lord of men is so dependent 
upon human means for aiding His children, how 
can the great Heart of God be impartial? How 
can His loving kindness be equally “over all 
His works?” Are not intercessions “special 
privileges” for those fortunate enough to have 
praying friends ? 

So we question; and the answer involves 
[ 91 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


nothing less than a philosophy of life, human 
and divine! To answer these questions with 
any degree of completeness would necessitate a 
clear-cut understanding of human freedom, 
responsibility, the meaning of fellowship, the 
character of our social natures, and the Saviour- 
hood of God. And yet, we believe that answer 
can be made briefly in a way that men will not 
distrust — unless they distrust themselves, and 
God. 

Our right approach to a satisfactory answer 
is to realize that such questionings are not 
chiefly concerned with intercession hut rather 
with all human relationships. It is no other 
than the problem of interdependence and mutual 
responsibility. 

Now it is our dependence, one upon another, 
that makes us responsible beings and gives 
worth to the soul. However problematical this 
way of life may be, yet dependence and responsi¬ 
bility is, nevertheless, the way of virtue and 
value in a man’s soul. To avoid it is to avoid 
true living. If one has no sense of responsibility 
toward others he is of all men most miserable 
— and worthless. When he is hemmed in by 

[ 92 ] 


SPECIAL PROVIDENCE 


an attitude of irresponsibility toward his neigh¬ 
bors, man is not free but a slave. He is fenced 
in by the self-made walls of his own nature. 
We are independent in proportion as, at leisure 
from ourselves, our souls reach out in service 
to others. This reach toward each other, that 
constitutes dependence and responsibility, is 
made up of definite acts of reliance upon each 
other; particular thoughts, sympathies, im¬ 
pulses, and acts of will. Our inclusive social 
natures count upon each other through par¬ 
ticular efforts of self-giving. We are liberated 
and developed in tried relationships. My larger 
and truer self is made up of the selves of others 
upon whom I can depend. 

Let us now reread the first paragraph under 
“Special Providence” and realize that the 
word 1 dependence’ is often incorrectly and 
loosely employed in discussing the things of 
religion. Special providence, particular forms 
of aid, certain telling acts of friendship, ways 
of responsible dependence one upon another, are 
made problems in religion, and stumbling-blocks 
in intercession when in other realms of thought 
and life they are taken for granted as the neces- 

[ 93 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


sary way we live and have our being. Let us 
contend stoutly that there is no religious diffi¬ 
culty of privilege or responsibility. If men are 
not disturbed about ‘ privilege ’ when a life is 
enriched with the great love of another, or 
ennobled by the stimulating friendship of a 
strong comrade, why should intercessions for 
others present any peculiar problem of privi¬ 
lege ? Religion is life. Whatever problem there 
be must be considered as the problem of all our 
daily relationships and responsibilities. In 
intercession, as in all other definite acts of re¬ 
sponsibility toward each other, the Son of Man 
uses our service as we give ourselves to each 
other in His Spirit of fellowship. 

Of course if we disregard obligations others 
are the losers. We are made that way; whether 
we withhold intercession or some other form 
of self-giving. If one member suffers other 
members of the human family suffer with him. 
“No man liveth unto himself and no man dieth 
unto himself.” Why should intercession be an 
exception? Pleading to God for others is an 
actual factor — a telling form of service — 
which does make a difference in self and in 


[ 94 ] 


SPECIAL PROVIDENCE 


others. Hence there is no legitimate objection 
to intercession, as Special Providence and un¬ 
fair advantage, that may not be turned into the 
fundamental objection to the way God made us, 
as dependent, responsible creatures.. If it is 
not too great a responsibility and not an unfair 
advantage for a man to be nerved and upheld by 
the self-giving love of a friend who is physically 
present, why should not the pleading of a 
friendly soul aid those distant in body but 
present in the One Holy Spirit. 


[951 


CHAPTER XVI 


Providence as Applied Law 

B UT we can not discharge the accusation, 
of selfish and partial help by means of 
intercession, through insisting that inter¬ 
cession is on the plan of daily associations and 
responsibilities. Granting that special privi¬ 
leges are found in many kinds of daily depen¬ 
dence — not religious — yet why carry the idea 
of privilege up to religion, and justify it in the 
very citadel of our idealism and of our faith 
in the impartial goodness of God? Why attri¬ 
bute to God Himself the social inequalities and 
unfair advantages which the clannishness or 
special interests of men produce when friend 
aids friend, and the friendless suffer for lack of 
friend to stimulate and aid? 

Such objectors feel that human beings have 
made a poor thing of human relationships and 
social righteousness; and that they then justify 
intercession with illustrations of these privi¬ 
leges in friendship as if they were altogether 

[ 96 ] 


PROVIDENCE AS APPLIED LAW 

good and virtuous, and could be used as a pat¬ 
tern of God’s dealings with His children. Is it 
right and just that one man should be saved 
from a torpedoed ship because of his mother’s 
prayers when equally good and patriotic men 
perish because they have no praying mother? 
And though we may cite an incident here and 
there of boys saved from accident back to pray¬ 
ing mothers, could not an equal array of cases 
be cited of boys saved back to unpraying 
mothers? And do not many praying mothers 
lose their sons? Ought prayer to make the 
difference, and, in fact, does it? 

What conception of God, then, do men hold 
who shrink from the thought of His working 
through intercession? Let us consider the alter¬ 
native. We are presented with the picture of 
a Providence that lives and works as “ unchang¬ 
ing Law”, “impartial Goodness;” Who, un¬ 
hampered and uninfluenced by the petitions of 
His children, enfolds all alike in mercy and love. 

Now this, at first thought, may seem per¬ 
fectly fair and altogether lovely. In reality it 
is a camouflage; a show of truth without truth 
beneath. It covers up, or ignores, the essentials 

[ 97 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


not only of experience but of the revelation that 
God made of Himself. To answer its fallacy 
will throw light on the special providence in¬ 
volved in intercessions. 

There is need to think out how “unchang¬ 
ing law” and “impartial goodness” of 
Providence becomes a reality — a living exper¬ 
ience — in the realm of personality. It must 
needs work in individuals and express itself 
through individual persons. Now, individuals 
find the law of pleasure in particular asso¬ 
ciations with each other that give joy and 
satisfaction in the way lives are rightly related 
one to another. Individuals find the law of 
goodness in the particular sense of worth and 
virtue that they share with each other. 

So it is that, unless lawless and altogether 
vile, God’s “unchanging law” and “impartial 
goodness” are made real to us and expressed 
through us in the deeps of definite and par¬ 
ticular forms of fellowship. Moral and spiritual 
law works in and as individuals in the different 
ways in which they give themselves to each 
other. But the way we feel God’s law and good¬ 
ness is constantly changing according to the 

[ 98 ] 


PROVIDENCE AS APPLIED LAW 

worth of our influence, and the kind ofm- 
fluence we exert, on each other . And so when, 
through a sermon or prayer, one life is inspired 
by another it is only that God’s law of good¬ 
ness is taking this special course — doing this 
special work which would not be done except 
for the sermon or prayer. We are concerned 
with the way “unchanging Law” works — with 
men's changing and changeable experience of 
Law. We are anxious to realize not the theory 
but the practice of Law. 

In order to show the fallacy of the glittering- 
generalities about unchanging Law and Good¬ 
ness we need to remember that men are con¬ 
ditioned by nature, and by nature find life and 
growth through particular circumstances. Uni¬ 
versal Law, applied to personal worth and help, 
must work in the circumstances and conditions 
in which men actually find themselves, in order 
to be moral and just. It is not favoritism that 
we ask of God in a prayer for another, but dis¬ 
crimination ; it is not partiality when we claim 
that our good-will in prayer helps another, but 
differentiation. We simply bear witness that 
we must particularize what otherwise would not 

[ 99 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


have particular and specific force. We would 
not have the spiritual influences for evil,—work¬ 
ing untrammeled, and freely yielded to — be 
wiser in their generation than the time-free 
efforts of the children of light. And we know, 
in fact, that evil has its individual enticements 
and particular forms and kinds of allurements, 
though generally and universally known and ex¬ 
perienced as evil. 

It means, then, that Goodness and Law have 
particular work to do and particular ways and 
means of doing it. In all our human relation¬ 
ships and forms of service for each other 
Goodness and Law are intent upon satisfying 
the various and differing needs of men, and 
upon finding every means of so doing. Prayer 
is a definite human means. Hence ‘Goodness 
and Law’ (meaning ‘God’) inspires our plead¬ 
ings and works through them to meet the par¬ 
ticular needs of men, which we utter in prayer. 
And it does not mean so much our sense of 
need for others that we express in prayer. 
Rather it is the law and goodness of God in 
our hearts, instigating and inspiring an impres¬ 
sion of need that He feels the urge to satisfy 

[IOO] 


PROVIDENCE AS APPLIED LAW 


through us. And He does move out through our 
pleadings to satisfy those we pray for. We par¬ 
ticularize God’s law of goodness as our interces¬ 
sion. For conditioned men are reached by par¬ 
ticular ways and means of God’s goodness. Else 
goodness is a figure of speech and not a force 
in experience. A multitude of personal influ¬ 
ences and relations and spiritual forces deter¬ 
mine, in fact, what universal Goodness and 
unchanging Law mean in any individual soul. 
The currents of many individual, particu¬ 
lar influences are found in the wind of God’s 
One Spirit Who blows His breath of healing and 
saving through the human soul. 

It is plain, then, that if men withhold the 
spiritual currents of prayer, with their par¬ 
ticular intent and force of effort, they thus 
render faulty the service that 4 Law and Good¬ 
ness’ invariably, unchangeably seeks to render 
through every possible human attitude of faith 
and good-will. For God made these ways 
through which to approach and to heal men. 


[IOI] 


CHAPTER XVII 


God's Discriminating Goodness 

W E VALUE God's impartial goodness 
and unchanging law not by discounting 
and ignoring the changes carried out 
by prayer and other spiritual influences, but by 
completing them until more and more they fill up 
the measure of the fulness of Christ — 4 1 that 
they without us should not be made perfect." 
If we ignore particular ways and means of 
bringing God into our lives we ignore our par¬ 
ticularized natures and our ways of valuing 
God. If we use every way of service toward 
each other, the very completeness and fulness 
of these particular contacts and spiritual atti¬ 
tudes make the partial complete, and so, im¬ 
partial. It is not the use of prayer but the 
failure of so many to make use of this channel 
of service that seems to make favorites of those 
who have praying friends. When all men every¬ 
where obey God and intercede for others, then 
[ 102 ] 


GOD’S DISCRIMINATING GOODNESS 


the partial goodness of man will be changed 
into the impartial channel of God’s goodness. 
Without this, the theory of God’s impartial 
goodness shuts theorists and their fellows off 
from having the force and joy of God’s good¬ 
ness that might come to them through the 
channel of prayer, — made universal as all men 
everywhere pray for their neighbors. 

If prayer did not count, would daily living 
then be rid of so-called 4 special privileges’ in 
religion? What of the special privilege that 
one possesses by having a godly friend, while 
another is entangled in pagan and sinful 
relationships? If every so-called special privi¬ 
lege were eliminated, would the result be uni¬ 
form spirituality and consciousness of God? 
Rather it would result in spiritual death. One 
after another of the ways of higher living would 
be withdrawn until our differentiated, partic¬ 
ularized, conditioned selfhood would be bare 
and negative and dead. 

So our Lord reveals Himself by using the law 
of human relations, and the goodness of un¬ 
selfish impulses, in intercessions. Human 
goodness is given force from God, by making 

[103] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


use of responsibility and interdependence in 
pleading for men. 

We need to keep onr sanity and balance if the 
mirage of false connotation is to be removed 
from religious thinking. Especially in these 
days full of penetrating troubles and also of 
splendid challenge we would see religion as 
life — unafraid of life as it is, and as it may 
become. The Master stands in the midst and 
asks men today: ‘What reason ye among your¬ 
selves? Follow Me. I am the Way.’ 

The Master prayed for Simon Peter. Yet 
He tells this man for whom He Himself has 
prayed that his service shall end in death. And 
Simon, asking of John’s fate, hears only the 
short answer: “If I will that he tarry till I 
come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” 
Now The Way took the way of intercession for 
our learning and obedience. And He tells us 
that our prayers of faith—prayers of the Spirit 
— shall be, and always are, answered. Yet St. 
Peter, for whom He prayed as the future 
strengthener of his brethren, had his life cut 
off by tragic martyrdom. 

Is it not because our prayers are often not 


[104] 


GOD’S DISCRIMINATING GOODNESS 


answered as we expect that we can intercede 
with confidence, and deny the charge of par¬ 
tiality and favoritism in onr Father as One 
carrying out only our restricted sympathies and 
partial friendships in our prayers? God 
answers the intercession and answers it in the 
right way, although there may seem to be no 
answer at all; or it may take a form the most 
diverse from our expectations. What we ex¬ 
pected and longed for was the accomplishing 
of God’s will. If two are interceded for with 
equal fervor and one fall in battle while the 
physical life of the other is spared, we will not 
deny that prayer is answered in the case of 
each; as a distinct aid in the Providence of God. 
“If I will that he tarry .... follow thou me” 
— to a martyr’s death. For the Great Inter¬ 
cessor is intent on the value of prayer to men 
who have all eternity to learn just how and 
why this is so. But because He is concerned 
with an eternal viewpoint, the time when death 
comes proves nothing about the value of, and 
the answer to, the prayer. Christ prayed for de¬ 
liverance from Calvary, and then went gladly 
to the Cross, since He felt that in His doing of 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


God’s will His Father was answering His 
prayer. It became His opportunity of showing 
men that to do God’s will was the real spirit of 
His prayer for deliverance from evil — what¬ 
ever the physical setting and sacrifice, or 'seem¬ 
ing denial of that prayer in Himself. 

The ‘sting’ of special privilege is removed 
from our thought of intercession if we realize 
that when individual lives are helped through 
prayer it marks the work of God in the uplift¬ 
ing of the whole race. It is not man’s selfish 
self but his self-giving nature that God stirs to 
larger life in order that each such strengthened 
soul may thereby benefit all others. If we be¬ 
lieved that General Foch was the right man in 
the right place, we did not begrudge him the 
help of countless intercessions; for so he was 
enabled to give of his strength and power of 
leadership to the world. 

The Hebrew people were given of God a 
discipline and training beyond other peoples of 
their day, with what at the time seemed special 
privileges and an advantage over others. But 
when they lost sight of God’s presence among 
[106] 


GOD’S DISCRIMINATING GOODNESS 


them as a gift of revelation for the world — to 
be given through their self-sacrifice and costly, 
self-denying service — the Jews fell behind in 
the spiritual progress of the race. Even in 
granting temporal blessings to Israel, God, in 
His providence, was seeking to inspire the peo¬ 
ple with a sense of their spiritual mission. 
Prophets sought to keep the chosen people true 
to their destiny, which was to minister through 
and with Messiah as One mighty to save the 
world through pain and travail of soul. 

The Lord of men when He was on earth was 
often hungry, thirsty, weary, cruelly entreated. 
But He never used His marvelous powers for 
Himself. Nor did He use them for the selfish 
advantage of another. He invested them in 
fellowship for the good of all men, even when 
He aided the individual. In intercession He 
was once wonderfully transfigured; but it was 
when He communed with the Father with the 
purpose of spending Himself utterly that all 
men might be saved. 

It is the incomplete, misconceived thinking on 
prayer, not its theology, that creates difficulties. 

[107] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

What seems favoritism is Universal Love using 
every open channel, because He is universal 
in Spirit and effort. He wills to use every chan¬ 
nel of service men make possible. And in the 
individual He is always intent on the harvest 
field beyond, bent on service toward others. 
So we are stewards and co-workers to whom 
God’s ‘ favoritism ’ means the losing of self for 
the sake of others. 

All too often intercession is employed by 
people for their loved ones only as a last resort; 
a final effort. It is used in a crisis when there 
seems no other way out. Being thus used the 
mind of men instinctively sets up an analogy 
between such intercession and the advantage, 
let us say, that a wealthy man in some trial in 
court, or some political struggle, gains through 
powerful connections. It seems a special 
privilege. 

But suppose rather that intercession should 
become the constant practice and common trait 
of all Christians — the instinct of the soul at 
work — the very breath of the Spirit using us 
all and as often as we will. Suppose men 


GOD’S DISCRIMINATING GOODNESS 

prayed for men until multitudes prayed for 
multitudes, and felt this kindred tie and new 
force of soul both in praying and being prayed 
for. Then there would be no more cases of 
isolated intercession, nor any talk of the favored 
few! For all would be one in the Spirit as the 
Father is one with the Son. A pentecostal out¬ 
pouring of the same Spirit, intent on giving 
fulness of life to all, would flood the souls of 
countless individuals, separately, yet with a 
reach that would include all. 

So God’s plan of intercession is not at fault, 
but only man’s failure to use it. The objections 
suggested are really only man’s criticism of the 
plan in terms of his failure to carry it out. It 
is well to have been concerned at some length 
to rid ourselves of this seeming shadow on God’s 
goodness. For He must be believed in as alto¬ 
gether Light or we have not begun to intercede 
aright. Our gloom of doubt is, after all, but the 
4 ‘shade of His hand, out-stretched caressingly.” 
So we seek to increase our force of confidence 
in the loving God, as we plead for men that the 
power of the Holy Spirit in us may have free 
[109] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


course. Also we save our own souls by bursting 
the self-gates and rejoicing that the Saviour 
can use our reach, beyond sense-wisdom, in a 
telling way in intercession. 


[no] 


CHAPTER XVIII 


The Divine Restraint 

A LL TOO frequently in our sense-contacts, 
one with another, there is a lack of sensi¬ 
tiveness and sympathy. The freedom 
and judgment of another, unconsciously it may 
be, are encroached upon. So one becomes to his 
loved one, whom he earnestly desires to care for, 
a sort of benevolent despot. And surprise and 
disappointment follow when the friend, the 
loved one, so cared for, fails to show the moral 
health and to share the larger interests of life 
in comradeship. Or it may be that our best 
efforts seem unable to enkindle cleansing 
shame and deep spiritual purpose in the soul 
we have drawn close to us. And the one we 
share life with fails to find the God of our life. 

What is wrong? It may be the sense-life is 
changed from a medium of good-will to a bar¬ 
rier between souls, because of some trifling 
irritation or lack of congeniality. But when 


[in] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


there is no harbored sin that separates, too 
often the trouble at bottom is a lack of restraint. 
We fail to make room in onr life for another’s 
freedom, and so for the other’s real self. “The 
friend destroys the bloom and fragrance of 
friendship by overbearing the one he loves.” 

But, as intercessors, who would wield the 
mental strength of intercession for the glory 
of God, consider how different is the course of 
God’s love. Within His strong restraint there 
is carved out, as it were, the sphere of human 
freedom. Even though, in the false use of his 
freedom, man blunders through the dark 
valleys of pride and fear and loss, yet the free 
control of his own life also lifts him to the 
heights of self-sacrifice where the winds of God 
invigorate his soul. 

God pledges to men the right of self mastery, 
and exercises His power with a great energy 
of Self-restraint in order to preserve inviolate 
His gift of freedom. And if we sometimes 
wonder why God, as a loving Father, does not 
forcibly intervene in man’s dangers and sins, 
let us remember that the responsiveness of man 
is of the essence of his freedom and moral 


THE DIVINE RESTRAINT 


worth. To coerce is to enslave. A man’s hope 
and faith and love are inherent in the right God 
gives him to act freely according to his own 
will. 

There comes to us this confidence and joy as 
we understand clearly our opportunity to help 
another through pleading to God for him: only 
the prayer offered in Christ’s Spirit of self- 
restraint has any real influence upon another. 
It does not affect the one interceded for at all, 
as Christian prayer, except it be with the right 
kind of influence. The Spirit of God does not 
carry into another life any false or hurtful 
force, any despotic crushing of new aspirations 
and tender pulsings of hope. It is a joy to 
know that our prayers are “censored,” and that 
only the self in us caught up and transfigured 
by the Holy Spirit can influence the comrade 
we long to help. 

We would let God speak through us in the 
energy of His own great Self-restraint. We 
would convince ourselves that God is not in¬ 
different and impotent in the silence that greets 
our praying for others. So we seek to appre¬ 
ciate the spirit and the conditions of His self- 

["3] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


restraint. For if intelligent faith makes us 
sensitive to the silent power of God’s sym¬ 
pathy at the times of our intercession, we shall 
be able to claim and put to use more of that 
sympathy in our intercessions. Our under¬ 
standing of the silent sympathy of our God will 
make our souls vibrate with His attractive, in¬ 
spiring self-restraint, and send on the message 
to others as our intercession. 

On one occasion, as our Lord went through the 
coast country with His disciples, a woman of 
Canaan cried after Him — pleading for the 
health of her child. And Jesus “ answered her 
not a word.” Disciples would send her away. 
They did not understand Jesus’ silence. It was 
a restraint of love, testing and drawing out the 
faith of the woman until, out of the background 
of restraint, He granted her request. But, in 
restraint, He worked a greater miracle in the 
woman’s soul than, through the gift of healing, 
He worked in her child’s body. His silence did 
not discourage; it stimulated. The health of 
the woman’s soul depended on believing that 
God Himself was greater than His gifts, and 
that for her to feel His attracting power of life 


["4] 


THE DIVINE RESTRAINT 

was the earnest of eternal health, both for her¬ 
self and for her child. 

Now if we understand God's Self-restraint 
in dealing with our prayers, and in granting 
answers to our prayers in the lives of those 
we pray for, we shall feel ourselves partners 
of God's Spirit of restraint that reaches the 
free-will of others. Into our prayers will come 
a sense of respect and consideration and con¬ 
cern for those we plead for, just as if we were 
in their physical presence and were trying to 
help them with tact and restraint and fellow¬ 
ship. We are pleading to God for brothers 
whom we believe are very close to us, when 
we pray for them in the Spirit. The worth of 
their souls impresses us and makes us conscious 
of the dignity and value of sharing God's Spirit 
of help with them. As we think of them as 
personalities destined for eternal living there 
is a feeling of restraint — an unwillingness to 
patronize and be overbearing — even as we 
plead earnestly and with constancy. So our 
service for them is a service with them. We feel 
that in the One Spirit they are with us as we 
pray; this individual or that whom we have in 

[» 5 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


mind, or these throngs of persons with whom 
we claim communion in intercession. The 
wonder and joy of having this unlimited part 
in the social order of Jesus has, in the interces¬ 
sor who senses the Lord’s Spirit of restraint, 
something of his Lord’s quality and force of 
control — not a hesitancy to pray for others, or 
the limited exercise of the privilege, but the 
Master’s respect for the freedom of those in 
need. Then, through us, the Master’s own 
Self-restraint will work for others as a trustful, 
inspiring love — intense in its appeal to men’s 
response. 

To perceive this Self-restraint of Christ and 
feel it in our intercessions would keep us from 
cheapening our appeals to God, and making a 
routine of our prayers for others. Intercessions 
would not he a mere will to coerce others to be 
Christians — a spirit of prayer that the self- 
restraint of God could not use; but a challenge 
and appeal; as if we were earnestly speaking 
to others face to face, or showing silent sym¬ 
pathy for them — a faith-effort that God can 
use and longs to use in aiding men. We seek 
to give our brothers through our prayers the 


THE DIVINE RESTRAINT 


force and aid of the Master Who would give 
Himself utterly ■—but in a Spirit of restraint 
that appeals to the free response of men Whom 
He seeks to help. 


CHAPTER XIX 


God Answers Intercessions 

I S NOT Dr. Hastings right when he speaks 
of the marked difference in attitude between 
our Lord as He prayed, and many who 
claim His Spirit ? He fully expected an answer 
to His prayer. He bids us do likewise: “Ask 
and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall 
fmd.” Jesus was not content to reason that 
prayer is a religious exercise that brings us 
nearer to God. Rather in the deeps of commun¬ 
ion. He makes prayer the means to an end. 
Jesus assures His followers that answer will be 
given to their prayers in His Name as a proof of 
the value of their prayers. 

We sometimes hear it said that a certain per¬ 
son prays with great ‘ resignation.’ But this 
may be only lethargy—lack of joyous faith! We 
may feel that some Christians are forced almost 
to dishonesty in trying to explain (or to explain 
away) the meaning of intercession. In con- 

[1*8] 


GOD ANSWERS INTERCESSIONS 


trast to their much speaking there is the simple, 
direct assurance of Jesus: “Every one that 
asketh, receiveth.” 

Let us expect that the answer will often be 
more spiritual than we anticipate. Their nearer 
relation to the King will be the chief answer 
to all our prayers for comrades. Our particular 
request may seem to us the greatest boon that 
could be granted our friend. But the soil of 
his heart may be rank with the weeds of pride, 
or bristling with thorns of selfishness. The 
petition we ask might add to the self-conceit 
instead of to the spiritual worth of our friend, 
if it be some material gift or human advance¬ 
ment. The particular form that the answer to 
our prayer shall take will be determined accord¬ 
ing to that which will make for religious fellow¬ 
ship: the chief and final response to each 
petition. 

We are concerned now chiefly with the belief 
that God does answer prayer in a definite way. 
This makes it worth while to pray. We may, 
indeed, have only a partial knowledge of the 
form and manner of God's reply. But this will 
be no real handicap to the eager, earnest work 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


of intercession if men really believe that God 
does grant a particular and definite answer to 
each prayer, according to His wisdom and per¬ 
fect love for men. We want to know that inter¬ 
cession has a value as efficient, constructive 
work. We want to be very sure that we believe 
this. The more we can believe that it has in¬ 
deed such a value, the more ready we shall be 
to leave all else to God. “ 4 Every one that 
asketh, receiveth. * Christ has no mightier 
stimulus to persevering prayer in His school 
than this. As a child has to prove a sum to be 
correct, so the proof that we have prayed aright 
is the answer; ’ 9 — which we know without ques¬ 
tion that God supplies. 

Belief in the answer is essential, for other¬ 
wise it is not intercession at all. ‘ Resignation ’ 
that is too modest to expect a reply to prayer 
is another name for skepticism. It means faint¬ 
hearted unbelief. But the very quality and 
spirit of expectancy and assurance must move 
men to intercession : for prayer is faith in 
action. 

So the very meaning of intercession involves 
an answer . It is a question of believing not so 
[ 120 ] 


GOD ANSWERS INTERCESSIONS 

much in the answer, as in the prayer itself. The 
very nature of the effectual, fervent prayer of 
a righteous man is that it avails much in its 
working. It is of the very substance of asking 
in Christa Name that we should receive. 

Perhaps this will become plainer through this 
passage from Dr. Hastings: “If we are living 
in full contact with, and completely under, the 
influence of the Holy Spirit, it is only reason¬ 
able to suppose that He will guide us in this 
important matter. He not only knows the 
things of God, but He must needs be able, also, 
to read the hearts of men, and to discover the 
spiritual condition of each. When, therefore, 
He sees that certain persons are in a receptive 
condition, inasmuch as He ever desires the co¬ 
operation of His people in His work of mercy, 
it would appear that He moves the hearts of 
those who know the power of prayer to pray for 
those particular persons.’ ’ And we may believe 
that our more general and inclusive inter¬ 
cessions, as we plead for a needy world, are 
with equal truth inspired of the all-embracing 
Spirit of Christa universal Saviourhood. 

[ 121 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Therefore, this most serious thing happens 
when we do not believe that our prayers are 
being answered: we admit, not only our im¬ 
potence in intercession, but, even worse, we 
admit the impotence of the Holy Spirit, Who 
moves men to pray and inspires their prayer- 
impulses. Would not this tragic impotence 
mean that God was unable to use the countless 
spiritual impulses He Himself created? Thus 
would His own work in us become a thing of 
naught. 

We believe, rather, that when a mother prays 
for her boy, since she does not shut God out of 
her soul, He sees to it that He is not shut within 
her soul . God’s Spirit moves through her 
toward her child. Otherwise God’s power 
would be restricted within her — a praying soul 
— although not hampered and hemmed in, out¬ 
side her, in the great material and spiritual 
world. So the praying soul, itself moved of the 
Spirit to pray, would be a detention camp of the 
Spirit, instead of a sharer in the all-inclusive 
life and plan of “Him Who filleth all in all.” 

Almost anywhere, today, we can find our 
neighbor as the man in need. Quickened zeal 
[ 122 ] 


GOD ANSWERS INTERCESSIONS 


and sympathy may so possess our soul that its 
neighborhood can be extended, through earnest 
intercession, to a world-wide fellowship in the 
Spirit. 


[ I2 3] 


CHAPTER XX 


The Human Side 

L ET us consider, here, a bit of human 
philosophy, and think of intercession as 
man’s part in a fellowship which is not 
restricted by time or space. Suppose I believe 
in communing with God, but am very doubtful 
whether it will do good to another if I pray for 
him. Yet, I recognize that my intercession is 
a sort of sympathy growing out of a desire to 
help. But, has my subjective feeling of good¬ 
will toward another any objective value in his 
life? If he is beyond sound of voice and sense- 
reach, do my impulses in prayer really accom¬ 
plish anything? 

Let us remember that we have restricted our¬ 
selves, so far as it is possible, to the human, 
in intercession. I have a definite desire to help 
another; which desire is strong enough for me 
to focus my mind constantly upon it in prayer. 
I might have reflected or determined on 


THE HUIMAN SIDE 


another’s good, apart from prayer. Yet, I rec¬ 
ognize that my desires to help another, when¬ 
ever opportunity offers, are strengthened by 
associating with me in prayer the sympathy 
and good-will of God. 

But then, I feel, when I pray, that my sym¬ 
pathy toward another must be influenced by the 
impulse and direction of God’s will in me. Even 
when I try to think of it as human, it must have 
somewhat of the temper and quality of God’s 
good will in it. So, of necessity, it is of more 
value than any planning for another’s good, 
apart from prayer. It means the human will 
bent on doing God’s will toward another. 

In whatever way, after this, I carry out 
my desires to help in some tangible, human 
fashion the one I prayed for, it will be 
through something more than human help. 
Human it will be, but deepened in pur¬ 
pose and enlarged in scope, because I 
shared my thought with God. And so, when 
I help another, after praying for him, God, 
too, will be giving aid through me. Indeed, one 
chief way in which God answers intercession is 
by moving the one who has prayed to be a good 
[125] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Samaritan to the man in need. It is much easier, 
after intercession, for us to find ways to help 
those we have prayed for. So when I share 
my sympathy with the Lord of men, I become 
the agent, not only of my good impulses, but of 
His ever-yearning grace, also. I reach the man 
in a way I could not, apart from intercession. 
The subjective becomes objective. 

And, again, if another knows I am praying 
for him, it must change his attitude toward me. 
It becomes an element in human relations to be 
reckoned with. The temper and spirit of future 
dealings between the intercessor and the inter- 
cessee must be influenced by the quality and 
spirit of prayer in the intercessor. So my ‘‘ sub¬ 
jective” prayer will have this further objective 
answer. Even the human “I” reaches the 
prayed-for heart in this way. Stored in his 
memory is the knowledge that a brother cares 
enough for his welfare to take the matter to 
God. 

If, then, through intercession, men may be of 
this much help to one another, how much more 
does intercession mean as the direct sympathy 
and out-reaching of God through intercessors! 

[ 126 ] 


THE HUMAN SIDE 


“More things are wrought by prayer than this 
world dreams of.” When God moves men to 
pray for one another, they share the power of 
His individualizing and inclusive reach. 


07 ] 


CHAPTER XXI 


On Being Present 

I N HIS “Creative Evolution” Bergson tells 
us that a body is present wherever its 
influence is felt. We are so prone to be 
creatures of time and space perceptions,— our 
reach narrowed down and hemmed in by the 
sense-life, that the deep meaning of “influence” 
escapes us. Bishop Brent writes in his little 
book on ‘‘Presence”: “Love them that hate you 
is not a sentimental rhapsody, but a calm rec¬ 
ognition of the fact that volitional presence can 
both impress itself successfully on one refusing 
to receive it, and seize upon the presence of one 
refusing to give it. It is this that forms the 
most thrilling part of our wonderful life of ad¬ 
venture and struggle .... we often attribute 
influence to the incidentals of personality 
instead of to the eternized personality which 
death unveils.’ ’ 

Now, neither “psychic” nor “volitional” 
[128] 


ON BEING PRESENT 


influence, we believe, in its work for God, is 
independent of the Holy Spirit’s force. 
Although psychic life, whether within or with¬ 
out the body, may have a certain sphere of 
influence and ableness of service, yet such ‘pres¬ 
ence’ can not be relied upon for spiritual fellow¬ 
ship unless it be the instrument and agent of 
God’s ever-present Spirit. 

Through the commingling wills and sym¬ 
pathies of men in intercession, volitional and 
psychic influence becomes spiritual presence in 
the One Spirit that lighteth every man. As the 
individual personality is not lost in the Divine, 
but is assured its own ‘place’ and freedom, so 
room is found for the influence of each soul as 
a spiritual being, whether with or without a 
material body, in the Holy Spirit’s presence. 

When God committed Himself to the method 
of the Incarnation, He imposed a certain trust 
in man which necessitates man’s co-operation. 
The Spirit of God, Who is renewing the world’s 
life, is the Spirit of the Incarnate One Who is 
constantly moving in the souls of faithful men. 

The commingling of men’s faith-energies in 


[ J 29] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


intercession as they reach out one toward 
another in the Spirit constitutes God’s sacra¬ 
mental presence in society. “The Christ- 
Spirit,” writes Bishop Brent, “is the spiritual 
ether binding man to man as the ether of space 
binds world to world. Prayer .... is a potent 
Energy that agitates the whole universe of 
presences as often as it is set in operation. It 
creates, extends, intensifies presence, un¬ 
hindered by the mathematics of time and dis¬ 
tance .... a phase of the Communion of Saints 
in volitional activity. ’ ’ What can be so potent 
as the offering men are able to make of them¬ 
selves to each other in an unrestrained and 
daring faith in God’s saving force of presence. 

In all the experiences of human fellowship 
we become more truly ourselves — more fully 
personal — when our experience includes others 
in such a binding way that we can have no 
thought or wish apart from them. There is a 
sense in which I can not say to another, who is 
deeply influencing my life, ‘ 4 1 am not you ’ ’ — 
so complete is the mutuality! St Paul said, 
‘ ‘ I live, yet not I but Christfor to me to live 
is Christ.” This holds true in spiritual human 


[130] 


ON BEING PRESENT 

contacts, one with another. We gain our lives, 
losing ourselves in others. As another’s pres¬ 
ence makes up my experience, it constitutes my 
very character. It becomes my social, growing 
self-hood. When I try to state the sort of per¬ 
son I am, I find myself telling of the influence 
others have had in developing my inmost soul- 
life. 

Now, what is the underlying groundwork of 
human 1 ‘ presence ? ’’ Does it not mean that the 
ability of one soul to influence another in a 
spiritual way is due to the fact that they both 
have one underlying home-life of the Spirit? 
When two persons are bodily present and par¬ 
take of one another’s presence and influence, is 
this not a movement of the Spirit set up in each 
by the other? It is not primarily a time and 
space influence. The senses are symbolic and 
sacramental. They are supplementary means 
and mediums of an underlying spiritual unity. 

And in intercession there is this same under¬ 
lying presence of the Spirit as in sense relation¬ 
ships. Why, then, should not faith (a more 
spiritual movement of the soul than sense- 
attraction) be the medium for the setting-up of 
[131] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


a movement of the Spirit from the praying soul 
to the soul prayed for? Such a movement does 
not reduce the Spirit of God to a series of ether- 
waves set mechanically into vibration, any more 
than when men are spiritually strengthened by 
each other in sense-life. My impulse to pray 
is in essence an impulse of the Spirit Himself 
in me. If God uses my senses in bodily pres¬ 
ence that soul may touch soul, is it a thing 
incredible that He should use the influence of 
my faith in intercession? 

Perhaps our prayer for another is an 
expression of some hunger and thirst of our 
soul after goodness in the social order about 
us. Then the prayer is answered in the act of 
asking. 4 We have the thing we ask for.’ Our 
desire to strengthen another in spirit is the 
strengthening of another. Being an impulse of 
the One all-inclusive Spirit, it has self¬ 
answering power. So the time element is 
removed. The immediate and self-acting nature 
of eternal Life asserts itself in our spiritual 
impulses of intercession. 

Why God should enable me, in my feebleness 
of moral worth, and my halting goodness, to 


[132] 


ON BEING PRESENT 


influence another and share the force of His 
presence in so great a way as in intercession, 
is, after all, only a phase of the mystery of 
Christian living, wherein a look or spoken word, 
as a sacrament of the Spirit, becomes a call 
from friend to friend to “come up higher” in 
eternal fellowship. 

“He that receiveth you receiveth me.” It is 
the Incarnate plan. “All power is given unto 
me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore.” 
The word “therefore” is full of the eternal 
meaning of being Christian. God wills to help 
His children, apart from the Christian’s inter¬ 
cession, for He has been Father, longing to sat¬ 
isfy men, from the day of creation. But, in fact, 
He reaches them fully only through Incarnation, 
conquering ignorance and sin on their own 
ground. And He reaches others as the Spirit 
of our life. 

Intercession, however, does not work auto¬ 
matically. I may speak to a friend with prayer 
in my heart, so becoming an intercessor in his 
physical presence. Yet, he may turn a deaf 
ear. So it was with Judas and Pilate, when 
Jesus spake to them. So also when, present with 

[ I 33] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


others in intercession, apart from sense-life, 
our appeal goes out to them in the Spirit. 

Yet, we can not tell when circumstances under 
God’s Providence may break up the hard soil 
of a restless heart and tune the ear to the sound 
of the wind of His Spirit — though they know 
not when it come. In the travail of our inter¬ 
cessory faith, those we plead for are appealed 
to by the Spirit. Our influence carries as the 
Spirit’s immediate presence in us and in them. 
We have but to believe this truly and fearlessly. 
Then, starting out on the adventure of faith, 
putting behind us our doubts and fears, we 
find that space is eliminated in so far as we 
realize our presence with others in terms of the 
all-embracing Presence of God. 

The sum of the matter is found in these words 
of Jesus’ intercession, which we delight to 
repeat. In fact, our whole story is but an effort 
to rejoice in some of the colors we find in this 
white light of final truth. “Neither pray I for 
these alone, but for them also which shall believe 
on me through their word; that they all may 
be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in 
P34] 


ON BEING PRESENT 


thee, that they also may be one in us: that the 
world may believe that thou hast sent me.” 
So we seek to define this oneness of human 
presence in the One Universal Lord. 


CHAPTEK XXII 


God's Social Nature 

L ET us begin and end with the truth that 
God has revealed Himself as social — in 
the Triune fulness of His Nature, and 
in the hunger and thirst of His Saviourhood to 
feel, in fellowship, the response of every human 
soul. Men pray to such a Lord. Dr. Nash, in 
“The Atoning Life” has expressed this great 
truth: “God's deepest difference from us lies in 
His capacity for relationships, infinite in num¬ 
ber, and each one of them going as deep as His 
nature. He clearly reveals Himself nowhere 
but in the deep of human fellowship.” 

Since we pray to the God of society, Whose 
very nature is social, what kind of personal 
benefit should we expect in our communion with 
Him if we exclude our neighbor? How often 
human prayers fail because our social nature 
is not at prayer, and God’s outreaching love- 
finds no companion and medium after His hind. 
In a word, if our prayer be selfish, it can not be 


[136] 


GOD’S SOCIAL NATURE 

used of God’s Spirit, Who values and includes 
all men. 

Let us perceive both God’s nature and the 
inclusive spirit of intercession in the following 
passage from Dr. Nash: “My neighbor’s being 
and mine, interknitting, give to God the only 
medium of revelation commensurate with His 
nature .... bonds of fellowship .... the only 
place where God clearly reveals Himself.. The 
man who is redeemed from his narrow and 
vulgar self takes and steadily maintains a 
creative attitude toward society, toward his 
nation and his race. ’ ’ 

God creates us out of the “pleroma,” the ful¬ 
ness, of His social nature. He seeks to redeem 
us and justify His creation in friendship. When 
He knocks and we open the door we find stand¬ 
ing without a Lord Who holds all men in His 
Heart; One Who makes intercession for all 
men. What correspondence of nature does He 
find in us — of faith, of prayer, of social im¬ 
pulse ? He bids us knock with Him at the door 
of another, to share with others the feast of 
love. He is content with our friendship only 
when we are intent upon sharing His friendship. 


D37] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Our Lord would share with us also the life 
He has with the Father (“I and the Father are 
one .... He sent me;”) and with the Spirit, by 
Whom alone we can call Christ Lord. 

The whole circle of relationships is social, 
and demands a social response. In this setting 
let us hear again these inexhaustible words: 

‘ ‘ As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that 
they ^Iso may be one in us.” 

So we are not made severally one with God 
in exclusion and isolation one from another. 
Our fellowship in intercession is one with God. 
Our oneness in the Spirit is one with God. We 
are baptized into the Spirit of One Who takes 
our common nature. The Communion of Saints 
is only comradeship in which we share God’s 
social nature, and His work of social 
redemption. 

However individual and personal our ap¬ 
proach to God may be, yet to the extent that the 
communion is real it fills us with love and long¬ 
ing for our brethren. How could it be other¬ 
wise when we approach the Universal Christ? 
There is in Him compassion for the multitude, 
and only by sharing this feeling with Him and 


GOD’S SOCIAL NATURE 


asking* Him what we can do to help, is onr own 
nature satisfied in Him. 

If, then, the social nature of God really pos¬ 
sesses us, what can we do with it but share it 
with others? And far from excluding prayer 
from such sharing, we should make it the very 
sign of brotherhood; for prayer that has not in 
it the spirit of intercession is hardly prayer at 
all. It is but beating the air with words. And 
there is none that heareth, no one that re- 
gardeth! 

We are told to believe that we have received 
whatsoever we ask for. We ask God’s aid for 
men. And it is granted by the Social Spirit of 
the Triune God, sustaining society;—the very 
Spirit that moves us to prayer; and already 
on His way to the aid of men. When prayer 
means to us the glowing fire kindled of God in 
our hearts, then belief in the answer to prayer 
is but belief that the fire of the Spirit is, in 
fact, a glow in us — the one Spirit of the Social 
God and of human society. 

That this great ideal of prayer is not always 
realized should not keep us from striving to 
attain it, or from accepting the rationale of it 

[139] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


as the true interpretation and worth of inter¬ 
cession. It is the goal toward which the vision¬ 
ing soul looks forward as the Master calls: 
“Come ye after me, and I will make you to 
become fishers of men. ,, We find our force of 
service in our ‘becoming. ’ Our mental assur¬ 
ance of the need and value of intercession is 
found in what prayer may become in us as we 
grow in grace. 


CHAPTER XXIII 

Man's Social Nature at Prayer 

I N THE preceding section, and in fact in each 
of these studies, man's social nature has 
been considered. It is our aim to present 
the subject of intercession in as many aspects 
as we may be able to, in order that the truth 
may become compelling in its fulness. Man's 
social nature needs all possible emphasis. 

We have all had experience with people who 
say prayers and yet are very narrow and sel¬ 
fish. The spirit of intercession is lacking. There 
is a failure to embrace others, beyond some 
limited self-ordained circle, in imagination and 
will and sympathy. To seek only our own good 
when we might put our prayers to service in 
the cause of a brother, is a form of selfishness. 
It shows itself in character, producing a strong 
negative argument for intercession. 

We search for the creative energy of char¬ 
acter, and find it in the social instincts. We 
seek the goal of life, and find it in mutual fellow- 

[ I 4 I ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


ship. We hope for the joy of living, and find it 
in mutual affection. We pray for the Spirit of 
God to give light to the soul, and He sends us 
the Spirit of His Saviourhood; of His social 
nature. 

And if we lift our hearts to God in true 
prayer — if there be real spiritual communion 
— it means that our social nature is instinct 
with the social nature of God. To be a 
Christian is to have a share in Christ’s plan 
of redeeming and uplifting the race. If we do 
not feel this purpose pulsing through our 
prayer, then we pray not as Christians, but as 
heathen — if we can be said to pray at all. 

We seek the truth about ourselves from Him 
Who consecrated Himself for us. Why does 
the innocent Christ pour out His soul in inter¬ 
cession for a guilty race? But we may as well 
ask: Why is God Love? It is God’s nature to 
give Himself, to create worth, to desire to sat¬ 
isfy need apart from the merits of the needy 
one. This is what it means to be God. 

So also with Christian experience which con¬ 
stantly comes from God, as the water-jar is 
filled from the deep well. We accept life as a 


[M 2] 


MAN’S SOCIAL NATURE AT PRAYER 


quest for creating worth —■ His worth — in 
others. We can not destroy this spirit of true 
living when we pray, without destroying our 
higher self. Our social instincts, spiritualized, 
must act in prayer, or we deny our birthright 
in our fellowship with Christ’s Saviourhood. 

The prayer of the Christian answers 
the knocking of that Saviour Who holds all His 
children in His heart. The Master enters not 
alone. We can be host to Him only when we 
welcome also the publican and sinner, the out¬ 
cast and weary, who are of His company. 

God’s love does not take the place He made 
for human love. Some would seek Him from the 
closet of seclusion, ostracising themselves from 
human love; jealous lest some other take His 
place in their heart. So they fail in their wor¬ 
ship of a God Who made men social. He who 
pleads out of the deeps of human fellowship 
is not lonely; the ascetic is. The ascetic may 
be a persistent intercessor, but he does not plead 
out of a rich, full, vital experience of social life. 
He receives and transmits only a very fragmen¬ 
tary conception of Christ’s social Spirit of aid. 
This Social Spirit is not sufficiently able in his 

[M3] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


own soul for him to use fearlessly the sense- 
medium in his contacts with men. So the 
faith-contacts in intercession, instead of being 
strengthened, will be weakened. There is little 
point of connection between the isolated soul 
and the all-embracing nature of Christ. In 
fellowship and service the soul becomes able to 
enlarge and deepen its contact with God, the 
Saviour and Intercessor. Intercession, then, is 
prayer in which our craving for human love and 
fellowship is included and counted on, but trans¬ 
figured in Divine Love. 


CHAPTER XXIV 
Solidarity of the Race 

A FTER visiting a children's hospital 
Bishop Ingram wrote: “As you see the 
poor little child die in front of you for 
no fault of his own, as you see the illness 
brought on by its father's sins kill it before 
your eyes, you see, in a way which you will 
never forget, and can never efface from your 
mind, that God has disallowed the claim of the 
individual man to stand on his own base.'' If 
an evil spirit immanent in bad blood is so 
allowed to work in the social order that it tends 
to cripple the life of an unborn child, shall not 
the good Spirit, immanent in those who are of 
Christ, influence as mightily the blood of the 
race for God? And the emphasis is on the power 
of the Spirit and not the limitations of the blood. 
If the spirit of evil can put upon an innocent 
child the mark of the beast, is there no counter 
power of good that can reach through man's 
will to the race? 


[145] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


The solidarity of the race is for better or 
for worse. The way of individual welfare must 
lead through social opportunity and social risk. 
Though there be so many chances of ill to break 
the bruised reed and quench the smoking flax, 
yet the might of God’s goodness expressed in 
human brotherhood is even more potent for its 
saving. 

Being one in nature men can claim a common 
Saviour; and can be in intercession the medium 
of the Saviour’s Spirit. Says Bishop Ingram 
again: “God’s great plan was this: to send 
through the channels of brotherhood the fresh¬ 
ening, reviving grace to press back that poison¬ 
ous mischief which had come through the same 
channels. And it is a man’s sense of fairness, 
his belief in the justice of God, that makes him 
believe that if mischief comes through the 
brotherhood to one another, their intercession, 
joined to the intercession of Jesus Christ, is one 
of the means by which the influence of others 
can tell on the human race.” 

In some a false idea of liberty has had an 
enervating influence on the force of their 
prayers for others. They would not overcome 


[ 146 ] 


SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE 


another’s free will by a sort of intercessory 
coercion — a demand that God make some one 
other than he has the will to be! This is but 
a bit of individualism, cured by gaining a truer 
perspective. What of the liberty of a soul 
cramped in the prison-like body to which the 
sin of another has condemned him? And with¬ 
out his consent! Let us remember the unchosen 
environment which in early years so ineradi- 
cably impresses its character upon the metal 
of the soul. 

So family and race heritage give illuminating 
evidence, which we may make use of in answer¬ 
ing objections to intercession. If forces of evil 
are seen to have such scope in acting upon the 
development of human souls, shall we timidly 
set a limit upon the good impulses set free 
through intercession, or upon the very Spirit of 
God Who moves through them ? 

Nor do we coerce another by our intercession. 
It is not a mechanical and automatic force. 
Rather it changes a man ’s environment that he 
may be free to choose the good. And when, by 
our prayers, some change is brought about in 
the circumstances of our friend’s life, it is not 


[147] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


coercion but the conquering of the very con¬ 
ditions that formerly had enslaved him. 

In his “Quiet Talks on Prayer” S. D. Gordon 
puts the matter thus: “Man is a free agent . . . 
so far as God is concerned. And he is the most 
enslaved agent on earth so far as sin and selfish¬ 
ness and prejudice are concerned. The purpose 
of our praying is not to force or coerce his will; 
never that. It is to free his will of the warping 
influences that now twist it awry. It is to get 
the dust out of his eyes so that his sight shall 
be clear.” Intercession does not coerce any¬ 
thing but evil. It is the great liberator. It is 
the racial impulse in our soul pouring itself out 
in pleading in order to bring good to the race 
in the Spirit of Him Who took our common 
humanity and is able to help as Saviour. 


[ 148 ] 


CHAPTER XXV 
Earnest or Eternal Fellowship 


S OMEWHERE in that illuminating book 
‘ ‘ The Atoning Life ,’ 1 we find this written: 
4 'The Captain of our salvation has made 
fellowship the test of religion.’’ We dream our 
dreams of a rich and full life. We marvel at 
the possibilities of our personality after death. 
But relationships of soul are the means and end 
of abundant life. And we may enter even now 
upon this relationship of intercession, which is 
the earnest of eternal fellowship. 

Our eternal good shall be known beyond the 
grave chiefly as the joy of marvelous asso¬ 
ciations, with God and created beings. We shall 
realize how true it is that God differs from us 
most in His infinite capacity of love for relation¬ 
ships. 

Even now the soul is offered training in the 
school of eternal comradeship, in intercession. 
For it is a school that trains men in faith and 
in the use of the Spirit of God, which are the 

[M9] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


eternal essentials of fellowship. How reason¬ 
able it is, then, that Christians should witness 
in this unmistakable way of intercession, to 
their belief in the truth that we are living here 
and now the Life Eternal. 

And what a joy to lay hold, with the Great 
Intercessor, of the lever of prayer, to lift the 
soul-life of humanity up to God! The task has 
elements of pain, for the spiritualized sym¬ 
pathies feel increasingly the strain of sharing 
the lift. Yet, even the pain is turned into joy, 
because we do share the Spirit of His Saviour- 
hood Who rejoices to draw all men unto Him¬ 
self. 

One day death will come and call some loved 
one to higher resting places in the many man- 
sioned Home of the Father. Will it leave its 
sting of loss and separation in the heart ? Will 
physical disunion cut too deep for spiritual 
oneness to be able in us? Not if our fellow¬ 
ship be already eternalized, through inter¬ 
cession, and through an intercessory spirit in 
all human relationships. Then the victory of 
our tested faith will overcome the world, not 
in theory, but in the practice of eternal living. 


[ISO] 


CHAPTER XXVI 


Pain in God's Plan of Life 

W HEN a man really possesses and uses 
an intercessory spirit, he is a respon¬ 
sible citizen of a far larger kingdom of 
good than the sense-enslaved man dreams of. 
All opportunities and plans in life have their 
proportionate weight and value for him as 
chances to increase spiritual comradeship. 

In a certain sense faith is the very source of 
our strain and distress. We share not only the 
world's pain and loss and failure, but that chief 
pain of seeing what might have been and ought 
to be, of eternal good. Both chances and 
dangers are viewed more clearly from this 
higher standpoint. 

But in sharing the Master's grasp of truth 
and His scope of spirit we are unafraid, in the 
knowledge that joy comes not with easier tasks 
but with power equal to the trust. So we re¬ 
joice to live the abundant life, at all costs. We 
see it as a training-school of the Spirit in which 
[151] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


we act as men given larger liberties in an 
eternal kingdom. Nor shall the body, with its 
love of ease and safety, hold ns back. We force 
it to the spirit ’s level, accepting gladly the hard¬ 
ship as the price of sharing fellowship with 
men in the untrammeled sense-free Spirit of the 
Master Himself. 

Indeed, the chief pain for one whose soul is 
filled with the vision of the Kingdom is his own 
neglect and shortcoming in his high calling as 
intercessor. The needs of men, visible to his 
awakened eyes, rise up to condemn his failure 
to share the Spirit of the Great Intercessor. 
Yet the primal quality of the citizen of the 
Kingdom, who bends his heart to the worlds 
load of sin and impotence, is joy. There is no 
wasted emotion in intercession, but the travail¬ 
ing pains of creation, in which all things shall 
be made new. 

Life’s dignity lies in the sensitiveness of the 
soul to the honor of the race. Dr. Nash puts 
the case clearly: “The common and corporate 
hope of perfection inspires all to care for each 
and each to care for all .... As Christ trains 
us, more and more it comes to be the case that 


PAIN IN GOD’S PLAN OF LIFE 


our sorest griefs are the griefs over the state 
of our nation and our race .... the sorrows of 
life sum themselves up in one sorrow that the 
kingdom of God, perfect human fellowship, 
should be so far from us.” Intercession has 
not only penetrating vision: it has cleansing 
hope. It shares the cup of Christa redemptive 
pain; and pleads with men to come to the 
Living Waters. 

If the pain of the intercessory ‘lift’ be God’s 
way, who would deny His way to avoid pain ? If 
we refuse the way of this service in the King¬ 
dom, then whatever may be our good works, 
we reject in practice the larger vision that has 
come to our souls. And like the young man of 
the Great Refusal, we must go away sorrow¬ 
ful. And this pain is pain indeed — wasting, 
wearing pain. Other joys no longer satisfy. 
Disloyalty to the higher trust — the rejection 
of fellowship with the world’s Intercessor — 
turns joy to ashes. 

So long as doubts and fears and lethargy 
separate men from the Intercessor — from 
sharing His Spirit and His purpose — just so 
long do they shun the growing pains of eternal 

D53] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 

fellowship. But this means that men shut in 
their own selfish sorrows by shutting out the 
pain of sensing and pleading for another’s spir¬ 
itual need. This unselfish pain is a liberating 
sense of worth that feels able to open self-doors. 
We open the door to the Intercessor. The joy 
and freedom of His presence clears the cham¬ 
bers of the soul of self-worries and fears that 
dissipate all sense of service and mission. And 
we receive Him gladly, yet knowing that we can 
receive Him only in His sacrificial spirit of 
intercessions; — which we must share, or lose 
Him. 


[*54] 


CHAPTER XXVII 


# Prayer for Enemies 

W E ARE naturally concerned in these 
days to show an uncompromising 
patriotism. The debilitating doubts 
and demoralizing fears of pacifism are instinct 
with tendencies which, if allowed full play, 
would break down the morale of the American 
people. And those who desire chiefly a moral 
victory would summon to the strife all that 
makes vigorous the soul. 

Perhaps there is, however, a yet greater 
danger threatening the life of America today. 
For there is more than one determined way to 
fight. One way is right and the other wrong. 
One is Christian and the other pagan. While 
we must have the force of nation-wide deter¬ 
mination to make war conclusive in mind and 
morals, yet we can not be content with merely 

* Written while America was at war as an editorial in the 
“Southern Churchman’’ of August 24, 1918; but applicable to-day 
in understanding the Christian attitude to national and individual 
foes. 


[ I 55] 



THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


weighing national force. As Christians we are 
constrained to test its spirit and quality. 

In the press of absorbing thoughts and duties 
brought to us as patriots in these distressful 
days, we have need to consider with an ever- 
deepening penetration that we are fighting, first 
and last, as Soldiers of the Cross. Necessary 
and righteous as the part of America in the war 
has been, it is entirely possible that in false 
patriotism to country there may be generated 
treason to our God. In out-reaching even the 
demands of Government we may fall short of 
loyalty to Him Who gave Himself for us and 
Who tests our fellowship with Him by our 
obedience to the letter and spirit of His 
commandments. 

There have been two kinds of patriotism in 
America. One nerved itself in a spirit of hate 
and ruthless revenge against the foe. The 
other had ableness of soul to pray for a vulgar 
and cruel enemy, and to have its very praying 
increase its determination to ‘ ‘ carry on. ’ ’ The 
history and genius of true Americanism is that 
of the working-out of this latter spirit. The 
stuff of our liberty is essentially Christian. 

[i56] 


PRAYER FOR ENEMIES 


Christian men pray for their enemies. They 
adjust their patriotism to their religion. They 
interpret the demands of country in terms of 
the commands of Christ. 

Many Christians, self-confident, prayed for 
the enemy in the beginning of the conflict. But 
as cruelty was added to cruelty, there came to 
them a change, consciously or unconsciously. 
They felt their patriotism strengthened, and at 
the same time their hate for the foe intensified. 
So it began to seem to them that the two must be 
one. The author of “Carry On” tells us that 
in the trenches he never hated his enemies. But 
the time came when he undertook an official 
investigation of French repatriates. He saw 
them coming home, a pitiful, heart-broken, half- 
demented throng. Many of their minds could 
not span the pathos of the part they played in 
the great tragedy. Then, says Coningsby 
Dawson, for the first time he hated his foe. The 
thing had gone too far. 

When our boys were killed or ill-treated in 
Germany, did the last vestige of intercession for 
the enemy vanish! Did the horror then go too 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


far? Is it a question of more or less before the 
spirit of our religion fails us ? 

Let us, instead, find some attitude of heart, 
some effort of will in prayer for the enemy, not 
unhumanly hard, that shall strengthen and not 
demoralize our fighting stamina. 

Many came to the point where they did not 
want to pray for the foe. They feared it would 
lessen resistance and demoralize effort. Men 
who abandoned decency and honor, who gloried 
in the might of their ruthlessness, had no right, 
they argued, to recognition or to intercession. 

Then the barrage of human hate lifts for a 
moment. A mountain-top comes into view, 
where meet the ways of God and man. On 
Calvary’s Cross the Son of Man hangs between 
two worlds, in loneliness and victory of soul. 
He is utterly sinless; cruelly, brutally, devil¬ 
ishly sinned against. His trial is a mockery, 
His sentence of death a travesty on all human 
justice. What has become of honor and man¬ 
hood ? Why should God recognize such a world ? 
Why not crush man and vindicate the loving, 
massacred heart of His only-begotten Son? 


PRAYER FOR ENEMIES 

But Jesus hung there and prayed for His 
enemies: “Father, forgive them.” 

He bids us share His spirit of prayer for 
enemies, and to look for forgiveness only as we 
have the will to forgive. “Ye are my friends if 
ye do whatsoever I command you. ” The Master 
knew what was in man when He gave these 
orders to His followers. He prophesied of war, 
— terrible and destructive. So we must choose, 
as to the type of our patriotism, between a 
pagan shrewdness which, perceiving that the 
foe is unworthy, deems him only an object of 
hate, and on the other hand, Christian loyalty, 
which sees the cruel facts if possible even 
more clearly, and therefore is more bent on 
using the Master ’s power to create worth. One 
effort tends to thrust men into hell; the other, 
to save them from hell. 

It is a day of decision, both in body and soul. 
We must take sides — we are taking sides — 
in the secret places of our souls, where we are 
being judged of God. 

But let us see how joy of soul comes in 
accepting the Christian truth that it is good to 
pray for our enemies. Would we acknowledge 

[159] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


that the power of Prussianism is greater than 
the power of God? Shall the spirit and system 
of Prussia delimit His power to save? Have 
we no more conquering Lord than this to wor¬ 
ship and serve? We do not pray for our 
enemies as an acknowledgment of their worth 
and dignity. We pray because our Lord’s 
unconquerable Saviourhood is able to take from 
the foe, in the self-revealing, cleansing fires of 
conflict, all that we are at war with in them — 
the brutal and fiendish lust of war and 
oppression. 

The point at issue is not indulgent weakness 
in thinking of the enemy, but faith in the might¬ 
iness of Christ’s Saviourhood. This spirit of 
prayer, when it really possesses a soldier-heart, 
is the finest fighting-morale in the world. It 
brooks no half-way measures; it knows no 
ignoble peace. Not content with conquering the 
body of the enemy, it must win the soul also. It 
has no less an object than to establish at all 
costs the Kingdom of God. 

This spirit may prolong, rather than shorten, 
the day of battle. Its ends are both more in¬ 
spiring and more exacting. In uncompromis- 
[i6°] 


PRAYER FOR ENEMIES 


ing fashion it fights the enemy with physical 
weapons, and also with a force of character able 
to make strong intercessions that Christa will 
may be established in the sonl of the enemy; that 
the spirit and system of war may be crushed 
by a foe who at last turns upon his own ex¬ 
perience, and is lifted by God’s Creative Spirit 
into a new liberty. We pray this not only for 
the enemy, but as the only way of final peace 
the world over. 

It is plain, then, that intelligent intercession 
has nothing in common with the mild pity of 
pacifism, which camouflages the problems of 
war, instead of grappling with them. It has 
to do with a God so mighty that He can remove 
from the enemy the very will to war, and so 
make an end to the causes and occasions of 
strife. Christian intercession is not a question 
of pacifism, but of redemption; of a faith that 
can actually accept the Master’s promise that 
we have the petitions which we ask in His Name; 
a capacity to act on these words of supreme 
authority: “All things are possible to him that 
believeth.” 

Shall we not remember as Christians, that, 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


whatsoever the provocation, the soul that hates 
loses somewhat of its own worth. If a nation 
be bent on spiritual ends it can not be 
patriotism to destroy the strength of soul we 
fight with. The enemy’s poisonous gas of 
hatred may inflict upon us a partial defeat of 
spirit, even in our act of winning the victory 
over him in the field. For surely we should 
know and follow some better ideal than his 
spirit of hate and revenge. 

We make our Lord’s part hard in the healing 
of the nations when we are not able to pray 
for the foe. For He has entrusted so large a 
share of His work of saving men to those who 
have pledged their loyalty to Him. He seeks 
to work through our intercessions. Our need 
is for the impulse that wills to save the enemy 
from his degradation and cruelty, and for the 
child-like faith to believe that our God is mighty 
enough to do this. We would not dissipate our 
energies and demoralize our souls with hate, but 
put them to patriotic service in prayer for the 
enemy. 

A Christian Prayer for the Unchristian Foe 
0 God of all power and might, Who art the 


PRAYER FOR ENEMIES 


Father of all men, and hatest nothing that Thou 
hast made: we plead the mightiness of Thy 
Saviourhood to purge in the fires of battle the 
heart of the enemy. Take from him the system 
and spirit of war. May he feel the impotence 
of his sinful cruelty, and hate the selfish and 
relentless greed that makes for strife. So, 
blessed Lord, do Thou, in Thy redeeming power, 
remove the causes of conflict in the will of the 
foe, and grant to him Thy creative spirit of a 
just and abiding peace. May Thy Kingdom 
come in all the world and Thy will be done on 
earth as it is in Heaven. And this we beg, 
pleading the intercessory Spirit of Him Who 
from the cross prayed for His enemies, and 
gave Himself for us, our Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 
Enemies in Fellowship 


C AN we, with only physical force, crush 
the relentless will of the enemy? Not 
except through complete extermination 
of army and home and nation. When the aveng¬ 
ing people set their teeth for such a program 
they retain the enemy spirit in themselves, and 
the fires of conflict break out in another quarter 
— it may be from the very defenders of peace. 
In seeking thus to save our lives from others, 
we will lose them in moral defeat. 

The victory over the enemy must first be 
heralded in our own souls. In order to break 
down the enemy’s morale, the physically 
stronger power needs also to convince an evil 
and beguiled enemy of its might of soul and 
purity of purpose. If the enemy fails to find in 
us, who are on an errand of final peace, the 
earnest of mercy and justice, then recon- 


* Also written during the war with Germany, but with 
for these reconstruction days of the world’s life. 


a message 



ENEMIES IN FELLOWSHIP 


struction days will be long, bitter and warlike. 
Evil must be brought to unconditional sur¬ 
render; but only by good-will can this in fact 
be done. 

So, not as an unnatural act of piety, but as 
the necessary and essential condition of world 
peace, and of soul-victory in the conquerers, 
there must be in us, in battle and reconstruction 
days, a real will to forgive. Else our own peace¬ 
ableness gives way and we show ourselves 
unable to preserve the peace we strive to pur¬ 
chase with such sacrifice. The right to guard 
the world against lawlessness breaks down 
unless we, as conquerers, have the spirit of 
full and free forgiveness for those we have 
vanquished. 

Prussia has denied the claims of universal 
fellowship in a cruel and shameful way. Only 
the true will of enlightened peoples, able to 
forgive, can restore her moral sanity. The strife 
of arms only emphasizes the fact that we are 
fully determined to justify ourselves morally. 
Else the enemy’s soul wins. Our steel pierces 
his body; his shaft of inhumanity lays low our 
soul in his own revengeful hate. 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


To hold the peace the enemy must be made 
peaceful. This requires that the allies hold 
even the enemy in the bonds of a fellowship 
able to forgive. Not so will we weaken the 
stamina of determined struggle; it rather urges 
men on to make the world worth fighting for. 
Yet it makes plain that the finality of this war 
depends not only on the conquest of arms, but 
also on the conquest of spirit. Shall not demo¬ 
cracy so believe in the value of liberty that it 
can liberate even the soul of the enemy from 
its own disastrous poison? 

A league of allied nations holding down by 
force the body of Germany can not guarantee 
final peace. If the fight is waged aright, by the 
time the body of Germany is conquered, she her¬ 
self will be ready to cast out the evil spirit of 
gross selfishness that now shackles her soul and 
makes for war. But this will be only if inter¬ 
cessors in increasing numbers plead for her 
regeneration, until her spirit really longs for 
our ideal of unselfish fellowship. 

Such an effort to make the enemy capable of 
fellowship, as the condition of final peace, may 
prolong, not shorten, the war. The end we seek 


ENEMIES IN FELLOWSHIP 


is the liberation of Prussia’s soul — cleansed 
and able to maintain a world fellowship. The 
will to forgive! That is the spirit of final 
peace. No other peace can be final. Our 
brothers’ sacrifice calls not to us for vengeance 
but for peace, won through strife that will make 
war impossible. Let us ‘ 1 carry on,” in war, in 
self-discipline and in intercession until the very 
soul of the enemy cries out for fellowship. 


[167] 


CHAPTER XXIX 


United Intercession 

I T IS interesting to watch a man who has 
been indifferent to the enthusiasm of a vast 
throng feel at last the moving force that 
springs from kindred sympathy and crowd 
spirit. So, in the congregation where worship 
is vital, some indifferent life is gripped with 
the vigor of a common faith, challenging him to 
loyalty. 

This is true of united intercession in a vaster, 
freer, and yet more spiritual way. With inter¬ 
knit affections and interpenetrated wills men 
deliberately offer to God the service of their 
common impulse on behalf of men the world 
over. Men plead together for their fellows in 
the moving impulse of the One Spirit Who 
lighteth every man. 

In united intercession it is not only that a 
number of people severally plead in a spirit of 
fellowship. It is the fellowship itself that 
P68] 


UNITED INTERCESSION 


pleads with God for men. It is the oneness 
of praying men, the kindred sympathy, 
the comrade spirit mingling as a single impulse 
of common faith that reaches Godward in inter¬ 
cession. It is an incarnate force in the Spirit, 
on behalf of a needy world. 

‘ ‘ Where two or three are gathered together 
in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” 
There is not only an adding together of the 
good will and prayer-impulses of the individuals 
gathered together. But corporate presence — 
in the commingling of minds and wills and sym¬ 
pathies of those who intercede — is able to 
accomplish in each of the group more of the 
force and mission of the One Spirit of the One 
Saviour than these same persons severally and 
apart would be able to accomplish. The common 
intent and quest of such mutual fellowship at 
prayer is felt by each praying soul. Each shares 
his faith with the other, and so has the vigor 
of this common faith that ‘charges’ the souls 
of all. And Christ enters into this common 
faith which each one uses in intercession. Thus 
the social nature of each helps the social natures 
of the others to be vital and earnest, and so 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


able to receive a fuller and greater force from 
the Social Spirit of the Saviour. 

Of course there is nothing automatic in the 
efficiency of group-prayer. Individuals, though 
associated together, can not share faith that is 
not eager and intent in each. But it is an oppor¬ 
tunity to quicken and stimulate the social, 
spiritual nature of each man — which is the 
intercessory nature — to feel together the high 
resolve and plan of pleading for needy men, — 
each sharing this common force of faith, till 
from this high-power station of corporate faith 
messages of the One Social Spirit reach needy 
men with clearness and force. 

The force of common faith at prayer was felt 
by the writer on a memorable occasion. The 
armistice was announced to American soldiers 
on the hills and in the ravines east of the Meuse. 
The strange stillness of hushed guns beat upon 
the tense nerves of fighting men. Then, for three 
days the writer, as Chaplain, with the aid of 
two hundred American soldiers, scouted shell- 
torn fields, tangled woods and ravines, dug long 
trenches for graves and laid therein the torn 
bodies of a hundred and fifty American dead. 


[*7o] 


UNITED INTERCESSION 

The sun was setting over the Meuse heights, 
turning them to deep blue. Then the light died 
out, wrapping the shell-torn field in the mantle 
of night. And in the twilight, dimly lit with the 
evening star, the clear call of the bugle came, 
as a call of the Spirit, to the souls of the one 
hundred and fifty men — grave-diggers and 
soldiers — who stood at attention at the grave 
of their friends and comrades, as the Chaplain 
prayed and declared their common faith in the 
Communion of Saints. It seemed as if the 
spirits of the living and the dead shared one 
spiritual force of fellowship that made death 
but the open door, and the one presence of God 
and the Communion of Saints the great reality. 
Many individuals there felt and claimed a 
common faith and heritage of Spirit which they 
carried from that hill-top of life and death. 
For God spoke to the soul of each out of the 
deep of fellowship, of faith and prayer and 
Spirit. 

When the Church of God unites in faithful 
and determined intercession — in Christ’s con¬ 
stancy of Spirit — the forces of righteousness 
will win in the hearts of men. Then spirits of 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


evil shall not corrupt and vitiate the moral 
atmosphere of social life; and we too shall 
behold Satan as lightning fall from Heaven. The 
corporate conscience will be toned and 
moralized. Each shall partake of the united 
force of prayer spirit — that radiates from 
groups of interceding men; and the Saviour 
shall have the medium He has prayed for, to 
make the presence of His Spirit felt and lived 
in men, in His saving might. 


[172] 


CHAPTER XXX 


Intebcession in Stewakdship and Missions 

C HRIST said to men: i ‘Pray ye the Lord 
of the harvest, that he send forth 
laborers into his harvest.” “Ye are my 
friends if ye do whatsoever I command you. ” 
Christ rules not with external authority but 
with constraining love. He lets men share the 
desire for the world that moves in His own 
Heart. He translates His commands into our 
own yearning, and so makes us fellow-workers 
with Himself. This is the rationale of that im¬ 
perative “Pray ye the Lord of the Harvest.’’ 

Even in this day of crusade “missions” is to 
many still only an uninteresting charity. They 
do not realize that the very life of the Church,— 
loyalty to Christ, is at stake. They do not see 
that faintheartedness in extending the Kingdom 
is the condemnation of their own Christian 
experience. 

The dominant appeal to intercede for 
[ 173 ] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Christian missions lies in the realization that 
we worship a universal Christ. He made all 
men; He lighteth all men; He has in the human¬ 
ity that He wears the nature and the needs of 
all men. His very work — His Saviourhood — 
is the outgoing of His longing to save and 
satisfy all men. When we see Jesus aright we 
see Him laboring for men, interceding for them, 
giving Himself even unto death for the love He 
bears them. 

So the follower of this Jesus does not ask 
whether he shall include this or that mission 
as an item for prayer or charity on his calendar 
of good deeds. This is his touch-stone: what 
Spirit am I of f Am I born again in the Spirit 
of One Who has taken the nature of all men, 
and Who gave Himself to the uttermost to save 
all men, and Who holds all men in His Heart? 

Intercession for the mission of Christ and 
His Church means catching the Master’s en¬ 
thusiasm for the race, and making it count. It 
is primarily a question of soldier-spirit. What 
would we think of American troops who stood 
guard over the stuff at home, if they should say 
that they had no interest in the far-flung battle 


STEWARDSHIP AND MISSIONS 


line; because it was so far away, and not their 
particular work? And what did we say of the 
brand of citizenship in our land that had none 
of the enthusiasm and spirit of the great Cause 
of freedom and justice and brotherhood? We 
called it treasonable and dangerous. 

Ours is a time of clear thinking and consis¬ 
tency. What then do we think of the kind of 
Christianity that does not feel the quickening 
of the Universal Spirit, or the moving force of 
the Cause and its Divine Leader? Is not this 
also treasonable and dangerous ? 

“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I drink 
of?” In intercession and stewardship and 
labor we answer with humility and strong 
desire: “Lord, we are able.” 

Before the world war we heard on all sides 
the old monotonous cry that missions are too 
expensive — a burden to Church finance. Too 
often was Christian stewardship indolent, half¬ 
dead. Christian people were a burden to them¬ 
selves because they had not the vision to see 
the Spirit and the Bride (the Church) say: 
“Come,” and to echo “Whosoever will, let him 

[175] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


come.” Like intercession, stewardship is a 
matter of soldier spirit. 

The stupendous financial undertaking of our 
country in the war just past seemed at first 
impossible. But it was quickly accomplished 
when there grew upon us the sense of an ever 
increasing devotion to a great ideal. The 
people found the money when they found them¬ 
selves. When they gave themselves in spirit 
and will they could not in honor keep back part 
of the price. 

And so with Christian stewardship. It is not 
meagre funds, but meagre enthusiasm that 
holds back the accomplishing of that for which 
the Master gave His life. And a great enthus¬ 
iasm for the Church’s mission is engendered 
only in earnest and constant intercession. In 
this country the great Communions of the 
Church of God are becoming inspired with the 
spirit of the Nation’s stewardship in war. They 
propose a sum in the hundred millions to be 
raised in a few years for missions;—a sum the 
thought of which a few years ago would have 
brought amazement to the most ardent advocate 
of the Cause. It is not much more than a cen- 


[176] 


STEWARDSHIP AND MISSIONS 


tury ago that Carey was somewhat scornfully 
advised to let the Lord look after the heathen: 
He needed no help of his! 

The reason for so large a measure of success 
in stewardship — to win the world for Christ — 
is found in the statement of a Christian min¬ 
ister: “We could not think our way up to such 
a sum, but we have prayed our way up to it.” 
Intercession generates the missionary spirit in 
stewardship as in evangelization. The force of 
pleading for others had thus its splendid way 
in Pastor Gossner: “He read the Lord’s 
promise: ‘Ask and it shall be given you,’ and 
then he went off and asked. More than that, 
he expected and prepared for replies. As a 
result he sent into the foreign field upward of 
one hundred and forty missionaries .... The net 
outcome of this man’s life was summed up at 
his funeral in a sentence thus: ‘He prayed up 
the walls of a hospital; he prayed mission sta¬ 
tions into being, and missionaries into faith; 
he prayed open the hearts of the rich, and gold 
from the most distant lands.’ ” 

The sum of the matter is, that if we pray to 
the Saviour, we must share with others His 

[W] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


Spirit of Saviourhood, or become disloyal in 
our high calling of God in Christ Jesus. If the 
things that are vital to Him — the impulses and 
yearnings toward the race which make up His 
very experience as Saviour — do not interest 
us, then the Lord Himself does not interest us. 
We can not separate Him from His work, His 
world, His Self-giving to all men everywhere. 
To receive Him is to receive His force of service 
to a world He died to save. He bids us share 
His Spirit of saving intercession. 


[ 178 ] 


CHAPTER XXXI 

The Spirit of Internationalism in Inter¬ 
cession 

W E WOULD conclude this approach to 
prayer with emphasis on the spirit of 
internationalism. The preceding essay, 
and the studies in the social nature of God and 
of man, have already told the story in their 
own way. Prayer for others as an intelligent 
act hears witness to the essentially social and 
inclusive nature of God’s Spirit, — in Himself, 
in us, and in the world at large. 

When individuals actually become spiritual, 
then nations will of necessity be one in sym¬ 
pathy and trueness of soul. The failure in 
Internationalism is not chiefly a failure among 
nations, but among individuals who do not think 
in universal spiritual terms. 

Just and abiding peace is in the air that free 
men breathe, whose lives are caught up in the 
One Spirit of the One Christ. His sympathy 
and good-will has a universal quality. When 


[179] 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


men of all nations are able to intercede with 
one Saviour, then a league of nations, courts of 
arbitration, and brotherhood in industrial life 
will be prayed into being. Intercession is the 
great force, largely unused, for an international 
peace of good will. 

May Thy will, 0 Lord, be done on earth as it 
is in Heaven; for Thine is the Kingdom and the 
power and the glory for ever and ever. So shall 
the kingdoms of this world become the King¬ 
dom of our Lord and of His Christ. 


Conclusion 


M ANY men will doubtless still seek power 
in “Christian Science’’ and peace in 
“Spiritualism” until they find power 
and peace within the Church in intercession: 
until they share our Lord’s Spirit in the 
Communion of Saints, and trust His healing, 
saving power over the bodies and souls of men. 
Social and moral movements will continue to 
multiply and to disappoint their adherents until 
the Spirit of intercession grips and uses men’s 
souls. Prophets will arise and startle men with 
the cry: “Back to Christ” until the Church of 
God has faith to move forward with Christ — 
through the travail of an intercessory spirit — 
to redeem the race. God offers to Christian 
men the force of His Son’s Spirit to become in 
them a power of saving mission to a sinful 
world. Will we fail God in this our day of 
splendid opportunity? The might of the Master 
— held back in wondrous restraint — waits 


THE FORCE OF INTERCESSION 


eagerly to claim us as fellow-workers through 
intercession in the great task of bringing the 
world home to the Father. 


FINIS 










Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 


PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 




































































































